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A small Practitioners group was assembled, at relatively short notice, for a hybrid event mainly introducing elements of new content for the Better Thinking for Better Results course. The reasoning being that, as the understanding and applications of LVT have evolved in the past 3 years, that this learning should be fed back into an updated version of the foundation training. The other purpose of the day was to give Practitioners the chance to share practice and learning as with the more thoroughbred Best Practice events, though within a shorter timeframe.

New Course content
This was introduced by John Varney and Anthony Blake, with significant chunks of theory being interspersed and illuminated with some new practical exercises. One of the exercises was The Exercise in Combinating. It introduces a simple but strict procedure to instil functional democracy and highlight how, in working in groups, there is an interplay between personal and collective agendas. It also provides the context to experiment with combination and highlight the importance of titling.

Some refreshingly frank feedback, challenging both the style and purpose of the content and its delivery, was well received and appreciated – it kind of nicely typified the mutual learning ethos of these events and will certainly help ensure that the next generation of course is all the better for it. See Better Thinking for Better Results.

Jeremy Renwick
Talked through the context and outputs from 3 or 4 assignments – One was a project scoping activity used to facilitate a client team with a project in crisis. Here, what proved critical was the ability to define precedence and challenge common critical path assumptions to weed out non-essential tasks and delays to help bring the project back on track. Another was a lessons learned review where reflections and ideas had been gathered in terms of what the team would do the same, do more of or do differently. Whilst the different triggers for the responses were captured descreetly, the responses were randomised and clustered to reveal emergent areas of consideration. Then colour was used to highlight the Same, More of and Differently distinctions. This clearly supported and revealed the areas of learning from the project.

Jan Crabtree
Jan shared a project start up process she had used to engage a team of highly technical/scientific colleagues, exploring ‘what elements does this project need to encompass?' She drew our attention to the rich variety of language participants had used in articulating MMs, and invited perspectives on what would help ensure consistency of substance/intent. Would there be an advantage in a list of powerful verbs to inspire participants as they create MMs?  This led to some interesting discussion on nominalisations, the importance of the initial Focus question, the need for effort and rigour in articulating meaning and the curse of acronyms and technical lingo.

Chris Heathcote
Asked fellow participants to share their approaches to introducing LVT to those not already familiar. There were two angles to the discussion – one around selling people on its value and potential in order that they buy in to its subsequent use in an intervention, the other on giving people a flavour for the practical principles and core process in order that they have an overview of the actual mechanics. The conversation was rich and diverse, with ideas including:

• photos of groups working with LVT and session outputs in proposals
• quick hands-on tastes
• time, space and challenge needed to enable anything truly creative to emerge
• tightly defined purpose – e.g. concensus driven action plan

Meena Jeewa
Presented a brief overview of her work designing consultations to explore and define play strategies with young people. LVT plays a key role amongst a range of activities used to put young people at ease and contributing their perspectives through participation as well as literally in LVT and other forms. Meena pointed out that they do not use LVT terminology in tender documents or with participants but do regard it as one of the key ways in which they distinguish themselves from competitors offering more conventional ‘focus group’ approaches. They instead use pictures of groups working with LVT and refer to the hexagons as MagNotes.

Jonathan Williams
Shared an overview of his  current process for reviewing projects and invited feedback on how this could be made more engaging, emergent and ultimately more productive in terms of organisational learning. The conversation that stemmed from this centred around the potential to engage participants in a more novel Focus question and clustering activity, oriented towards some form of concrete action, rather than a more conventional quick-fire review to populate the pre-determined vessels of Initiation, Execution and Completion. We also cross referenced Jeremy’s input and the idea of plotting feelings/mood/temperature along a project timeline to reveal underlying issues and root causes.

Carlo Gabrielli
This was a virtual contribution via video showing posters such as the following which are arranged for maximum visibility around the offices of the tour operator Podium, San Marino, Italy. They are about two metres wide. These posters were the summary of work done by all 70-80 employees in small groups articulating their thinking on How to improve bookings by 25% in the coming year? The spatial arrangement and the use of the Bees was entirely driven by aesthetics. In discussing the video it was reasoned that creating and displaying an outcome and its aesthetics are a form of Integration.

Review Session
A single review session encompassed a review of how participants felt their expectations had been met and provided the opportunity to share reflections on the day.

Everyone expressed that their expectations from the event had been met and exceeded.

The following comments were made in the last part of the roundup:

• The session generated good ideas
• The quality of the meeting and individual input is high
• The history of LVT is clearer
• The session has generated a future direction and tangible ideas to take away
• Found fellow advocates of LVT
• Updated learning of what has been happening with LVT
• The value of engaging users in the last steps of LVT (which maybe was not so clear a few years ago)
• The importance of being 'in the melting pot’
• Managing energy levels throughout the course of a meeting is important
• The importance of understanding the space between the hexagons
• Understanding the value of LVT both perceived and actual
• Meetings can run in various ways, so freedom in communication is important
• In a substantial session, it is even more important to be clear about the purpose

The next Best Practice Event is on 2 December 2009