Aligning your organisation with how nature and people thrive: Eden Project and Maffick Ltd. -stylie
In Melbourne, I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with Dave Harland, executive director of the Eden Project and CEO of Eden Project International, to deliver two workshops exploring how to align our organisations with the ways that nature and people thrive.
We had a 1-day and a 1/2-day version. We were generously supported by Dominique Hes and her Thrive Research Hub at the University of Melbourne, and hosted by Grimshaw Architects. (Their venue had this cool grid that we put Dave in.)
In our workshops, we used three main elements:
Thrivability ideas created by my friend and visionary colleague Michelle Holliday, and honed by the pirate-y playful global learning adventure that she and I initiated called the Thrivable World Quest.
Applied improvisation practices, mindsets, and activities, which engender trust quickly, establish highly engaging and collaborative ways of working, and help to embody different aspects of Thrivable organisations.
Practical, engaging, and wonderfully candid stories about the evolution of the Eden Project, and how that experience mapped on to the Thrivability ideas.
“The gelling of real world experiences with a really powerful, fun take is actually a winning combination.” -Dave Harland
One of the ways Michelle and I defined ‘Thrivability’ for the Quest is,
“The intention and practice of aligning organisations with how nature and people thrive.”
Subtly driving the themes of the Thrivable World Quest events was a holistic model that Michelle Holliday had created after years of biology and organisational research, and which we refined slightly through our global ‘test drive’ with the quest.
The model has three levels - a level which engages with the outside world, a level which is internally focussed, and a middle level which focusses on the ‘connective tissue’ between the two other levels. (For a more in-depth description, watch this 90-minute video.)
After describing the model to participants, I put each piece of it on the floor, and invited people to stand where they feel strong organisationally (or for self-employed people, individually), and invited people to explain why they stood where they did.
Each aspect of the model is related to every other aspect. Exploring those interdependencies consciously helped people to articulate how a strength in one area could support strengths in other areas synergistically, and in ways they had not thought of before.
And then we asked ’what might be different if we wanted life on the planet to thrive?’, a question Michelle constantly brought to our work together and which beautifully brings us back to the real reason we all gathered together in these workshops.
But, being human, we sometimes have some hangups about being extraordinary…
Applied Improvisation to help us be extraordinary by stealth
Sometimes it is difficult to go straight for extraordinary. I’ve been developing applied improvisation practices in people for over 10 years. Many years ago, I learned an applied improvisation brainstorming activity from Sue Walden called ‘Evil/Good’. I recently adapted it by creating a third category, ‘Amazing’.
In our Melbourne workshop, after I ran a few activities which help to establish good behaviours for brainstorming, such as short turn taking and accepting and building on each other’s ideas, we moved into Evil/Good/Amazing.
The set up went like this. We invited participants to get into three groups of four people, and handed them a landscape piece of Flipchart paper that was folded into three columns. (They could only see the first column.). At the top it said ‘Evil’.
Each group was tasked with brainstorming the attributes of an evil cafe. Before they started, we bandied around a few possible evil ideas - the cafe smells terrible, the food is rotten, the service is very skilfully passive aggressive - that sort of thing. Then the groups brainstorm their own evil attributes. The key here as the facilitator is to make sure that people are specific. E.g. not just that it ‘smells bad’, but ‘it smells of sweaty gym socks dipped in sewage.’
When the groups have pretty well filled their Evil columns, you invite them to stop and open up the next column. This one says ‘Good’. The groups are now invited to take attributes from the Evil column, and not just to state their negative (e.g. ‘it does not smell of sweaty gym socks dipped in sewage’), but to create something in the good column which ensures that the evil attribute would never be an issue. (E.g. well ventilated with clean air combined with smells of fresh roast coffee).
After groups have specified a healthy amount of attributes in the ‘Good’ column, you invite them to open up the last column, headed ‘Amazing’. The invitation here is to take the attributes in the ‘Good’ column and make them ‘Amazing’ - take them to the next level. Bring in environmental and/or social issues or, if they were already there - make those extraordinary.
Three lovely take-aways from this activity on the day:
Starting with ‘Evil’ is a fun, low stress, low risk way to start. There are also elements of the ‘evil’ column that can be true. Even if a cafe doesn’t smell like sweaty gym socks, some of them do smell bad. Being playful around that tends to reveal some truth.
Some of the attributes in the ‘Amazing’ column would be easy to implement. (Dave noticed this). The problem is that on most projects, we all stop at ‘good’.
Leaving ‘Amazing’ to last, instead of trying to tackle it first, allows groups to discover things they would have probably never thought of.
Practical, engaging and candid stories about Eden Project
The Eden Project had run a similar activity with their board, brainstorming the 10 top ways that they could kill their business. Through this, it became clear that:
Parking had to be an easy, pleasant experience
Ticket purchase and entry had to be fast, easy, and clear
Access to good, clean toilets was essential (it’s a long drive to get there).
The first two insights informed their ticketing service design, parking lot layout, and parking attendant hiring criteria (they needed nice, engaging parking attendants).
The last insight helped them to challenge the conventional wisdom of Grimshaw (our talented hosts, and chief architects of the Eden Project in the UK) in terms of how many toilet stalls they put in. The number of toilet stalls Grimshaw originally suggested was based on initial peak visitor numbers. Eden doubled it.
When Dave shared that story, I perked up. As a visitor to the magical Eden Project earlier this year, who, like many others, arrived rather desperate for the loo, I was delighted to see how big and accessible the ladies room was (as well as the stunning majesty of the entire campus, but loos come before self actualisation on the Maslow hierarchy.)
In terms of our Melbourne workshops, people left inspired, energised, and filled with juicy questions for their organisations, and a new, holistic way with which to view it.
What struck Dave was “No matter the individual participants and their backgrounds, seeing group dynamics develop in front of your eyes as they realise they are fellow travellers are are not alone was marvellous to behold.”
