This is a simple brainstorming exercise I often use in my training courses:
You’re an assistance agency and you are here at point A.(draws an A in the upper left corner of the flipchart)
There are hungry people here at C.
(draws a C in the lower right corner)
Here at B (draws a B in the center of the board) there is a conflict.
Your task is to feed C.
Turn to your neighbor. You have two minutes to come up with as many options as you can. The team with the most options wins a prize.
. . .
Does that scenario sound familiar? Hmm. Where have we seen something like this recently?
It is a common enough situation in humanitarian work. The “conflict” at B can be left undefined, allowing people to fill in their own experience or the facilitator can make it explicit: B might be a group fighting C, B might be groups fighting one another but unrelated to C, B might be gangs of random thugs, B might be rising floodwaters, etc.
No group ever fails to come up with more options than there are people in the group. If there are twelve people in the workshop, collectively they’ll come up with about 18 options in two minutes. Forty people will come up with about 60 options. It’s almost uncanny and profoundly hopeful.
This particular game was developed by Bosnian aid workers facing such a crisis. They stripped their circumstance of all identifying, and therefore prejudicing, characteristics in order to get to the heart of the problem they were facing. They came up with dozens of options, one of which they worked out in detail and used successfully.
The whole exercise takes about thirty minutes; two hours if we’re developing and refining options for an actual problem.
The prize in my workshops is a bag of candy.
Posted by Martial