Report on Best Practice with LVT, 3 Dec '08
11 participants braved winter conditions to rendezvous in the local village and get ‘up-lifted’ to High Trenhouse for this event. Meeting up in an icy car park and sharing the spectacularly beautiful, snow-bound 5-mile journey was such an excellent start to the day it couldn’t have been planned any better. Although we started ¾ hr late, the time was made up by reviewing 3 sessions at a time instead of each in turn as with previous such events. We finished the day as scheduled at 4.00pm, but as ever the day could have been a bit longer.
Stated hopes from the event included seeing examples of LVT being used well, road-testing applications, clarity around what LVT is, Learning more about links with other methods, reflection on what has been retained and put into practice, experimenting together and assessing the event format.
Brief introductions were followed by a series of presentations from LVT Practitioners, with a review at the end of the morning and the afternoon for peer appraisal, consolidating learning and surfacing links and parallels across sectors and domains.
Inputs
Participants were requested to prepare in advance either a 50minute interactive session or a 15 minute presentation that evidenced their application and learning with LVT. The running order was designed in advance in the following sequence, with each presenter’s name being linked to their LVT profile where available, and further links to summaries of their inputs, again where available.
Mike Booth
Shared the outputs from a session he ran to surface the aspirations of board members of HyBoss - a community enterprise initiative run on the Sirolli Institute model of enterprise facilitation set up recently in Hyndburn. The outcomes were useful in revealing the commitment of members and the process itself useful in assessing their ability to interact and engage with others and with an open-ended task. See Mike’s PowerPoint capture of boards and review points, aspirations of board members
Christine Bell
Shared the outputs of an informal meeting she had in a café with a couple of clients, exploring a new venture aimed at developing entrepreneurial skills. Starting with some key competencies as headings, rather than imposing a structured process that would have been inductive in the context, she used a small LVT board to capture salient points as an annotation of the conversation that her clients increasingly referred to and participated in shaping by pointing out links gaps and associations. See Christine’s summary and review PowerPoint, Qualities of Entrepreneurs.
Jonathan Williams
Shared the outputs from a session aimed at scoping a Project Knowledge Sharing policy document. Through the rigour in his application of an extended LVT process, what he revealed as striking was the realisation of passion and enthusiasm for a project that was at first regarded dull and turgid. No longer was the project seen as being about creating a rulebook, rather designing a climate and the supporting systems for a new knowledge management culture. See Jonathan’s Using LVT to create a Policy document PowerPoint.
Anthony Blake
Led a participative session that mirrored a ‘conventional’ LVT process, yet with a tight and defined sequence of procedural stages. In relation to the other inputs and methods, it challenged participants to question the imposition of rules and constraints. His paper outlines this in essence. See Anthony’s paper, LVT Thinking in Combinations (Word) and his PDF report on the Thinking Exercise at this event.
Steve Padget
Gave an overview of his work with post-graduate trainee English teachers and the current agendas for the development of thinking skills, constructivist approaches and dialogic teaching methods. In this context he presented LVT as a particularly suitable medium for both developing his trainees and also equipping them with the means to deliver in their classrooms, showing examples of outcomes and trainee feedback from both instances. See Steve’s PowerPoint, LVT and the thinking curriculum.
John Varney
Shared the outcomes of a session he had run as a module in a fuller day aimed at developing a newly formed team. As well as enabling the team to rapidly arrive at defined aspirations and action plans to present to their CEO, the session also enabled them to identify deficits in their make-up and use their audience with senior personnel to seek its rectification. See John’s case study LVT in team development.
Mike Cambray
Led a hands-on session to road test an exercise he intended to incorporate into a leadership programme for consultant clinicians. He set the scene to get participants in-role, and following the session invited participants to explore how the session could be built upon to better work within the context of the leadership programme as a whole. See Mike’s summary report Thinking about leadership with Doctors
Reviews
The above sessions were reviewed in blocks of 3, one review preceding lunch and one at the end of the day. Insights were noted and captured randomly, and tended not to be specific to one input but rather drawing inferences from the similarities and contrasts between them. For example, there was some discussion about the diverse levels of complexity of process and rigour applied in the presented examples, and how they were equally valid, just catering for different learners and differing intended outcomes.
One potential ‘sense’ of the review points has been made here by titling clusters of the randomly gathered review points. For those wishing to explore there own sense, here is the raw material in a visual concept model.
An essential thing about LVT is that it renders \'thoughts\' into a form that makes them all \'equal\'. It is then, just because they are \'equal\', that we can use the ways of combining and assembling thoughts that we have devised. At any stage of LVT, all the MMs we are dealing with will look the same. They have the same \'size\' for example and should be couched in much the same grammar. And we do not - though this need not be a hard and fast rule - ascribe them to their particular authors.
One thing I added was to make a rule that \'clusters\' or combinations of MMs at stage ‘Organise’ consist of the same number of MMs as each other. Since, then, what we deal with is always the same in terms of size, number and is also indifferent to authorship our attention may be better focused on how they differ - which is their MEANING.
All this belongs to the ethos of \'functional democracy\' as I crudely call it. It enables the production of a shared mental space. The belief is that this enables shared thinking and by-passes (at least to some degree) the dominance or submergence of personalities.
My late friend Patrick de Mare - who was a man with 60 years of experience with dialogue in groups - used the Greek word \'koionia\' in the sense of \'impersonal fellowship\' and I like that approach.
I hope that in the near future we can share with you some recent work on the stage we call ‘Integrate’.
Meanwhile, I would ask that anyone who tries out anything they picked up from the exercise write about what they did and how it went. I would be most grateful.
One of my favourite terms is \'meaning game\' and I like the idea of us playing a game because it combines having rules with PLAY! Unlike most games, it is not competitive but a collaboration. I think we can claim to have a way for people to combine their thoughts to effect.
The especially remarkable thing, which I felt was most wonderfully exemplified by Jonathon’s story (I hope he will write it up), is that with LVT we have a strict sequential method of stages that, far from blocking creativity, seems to awaken it or welcome it in. We can start with the vaguest notion of what we want yet, by utilising just the materials we have at hand – the people, knowledge, documents, etc. – we can build a pathway to something of substance and utility. We hear a lot about ‘emergent process’ and it has been variously described and discussed but, in LVT, we get to practice it intentionally.
It seems that just because LVT addresses some necessary functions of thinking and takes care of them we do not have to stop and think about them and so a flow can operate. All we have to do is trust in the process. I think that LVT flourishes when we feel we are in the dark. It gives us something to do in stages that enables us to build a pathway. We don’t need to follow any model of what things should be like.
The event also brought home to me how powerful it is when we strictly observe giving everyone equal value and scope of performance. This helps so much towards by-passing the egoistic attachment to one’s own ideas that just precisely block the flow. I was reminded of the saying of my late friend Patrick de Mare who used to aver, ‘Mind is between brains not in brains’. This is precisely what is followed in LVT. We create a mental space in which we all participate – and it is quite different from ‘adding’ our separate ideas together. This approach is also quite contrary to the usual one which is so much predicated on some people having better ideas than other people. We’ve seen the outcome of this view in the present crisis.
As the Buddha might say, ‘Let the people work out their own salvation with diligence’.
Many thanks again for organising the event. May there be many more.
I found the day very rewarding and it gave me a lot of things to reflect on about LVT and its uses in a variety of formats. There were a lot of interesting points about the approach you use to facilitation and I thought that Tony's session on the use of rules and structures was thought provoking and I have already tried one of the techniques out in practice.
Your feedback
“Having tried other visually based aids and failed, I found this concept easy to understand and easy to use” TrainingZONE |