More and more, the word from above – from government, from corporate and university management – is that we have to do more with less. This is symptomatic of the current climate of austerity, particularly when it comes to the use of public funds. Enduring a recession means managing the pressure of cost-saving cut-backs without letting go of important goals and objectives that will allow for growth.

This kind of challenge, in the short term, can actually improve our productivity as it forces us to test our own assumptions about how long things take, how many people are required, or how much it costs to do what we’ve set out to do. Tremendous creativity can result from rethinking what you do to survive an austerity budget.

Knowinnovation realizes that there is a lot of pressure on universities in the UK to have more impact despite the limits on resources. We’ve taken this into consideration, fine-tuning our Catalyst facilitation development workshops to help people pick up tools that will help them get the more creativity from of their colleagues in the shortest amount of time.

How do you ensure creative outcomes from every meeting that you lead or facilitate? It’s all about making sure that you are clear about what you need to achieve in that short one or two-hour meeting. Its about getting the right people round the table and it’s about pre-meeting preparation and using tools and techniques that enable you to use the time effectively to get to creative outcomes.

Time can be the greatest limitation, so it’s also about understanding what you can realistically achieve in the time allocated and deliberately managing expectations of everyone involved.

Knowinnovation has developed a workshop for the upcoming Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) conference in June, titled “How to create a great meeting from nothing?” The workshop offers tools to help you make the most out of those short meetings that have tall objectives, where you need results in limited time or you need to create more value with fewer resources.

If you’re interested in attending, click here to get more information about the ARMA conference being held at the East Midlands Conference center at the University of Nottingham’s University Park campus on June 11th and 12th, and be sure to sign up for our program, which will be held in the afternoon on Wednesday, June 12th.

It seems like the culture of “more with less” is here to stay, at least for a while. We hope this workshop will help participants face this challenge with enthusiasm and energy, and see it as an opportunity rather than a problem.

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Know Further:

Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to characterize the way technology has driven doing more with less. The myths and reality of more with less. And how doing more with less, over a long period of time, can be depleting and lead to, well, less.

The workshops that Knowinnovation runs are often fascinating: we get to collect a diverse group of very intelligent minds in a room for a week, around an important challenge, and walk them through an intense process where they often re-define the problem and generate a number of ideas for potential research projects that will help us better understand the problem, if not help to solve it. In the right environment, people can move extremely fast and far in their thinking, surprising even themselves with their own ideas. It’s something to witness. Keep reading »

Although the Knowinnovation team facilitates a number of different kinds of workshops and events, we’re probably most known for running Sandpits and Ideas Labs. These 5-day events, very intense and immersive, bring together people of diverse backgrounds and disciplines in order to generate ideas for radically novel research proposals. KI has developed a process that helps these extreme ideas emerge, but there’s another very important component to the success of these workshops: the collection of participants in the room. Here’s how we counsel our clients to organize a group for one of these events. Keep reading »

Despite our intelligence and immense creative potential, human beings are still very good at pointing out the things that make us suspicious because they are seemingly impossible.

“That won’t work,” is a standard response to a new idea, and anyone who considers themselves to be innovative will probably bristle and as a result, dive into figuring out how to doctor up the idea and make it work. This is a noble approach, one we at Knowinnovation would appreciate more than acquiescing to the can’t-be-done mentality. But there might be a better approach. Keep reading »

The human mind is, for the most part, set on being in the know. We don’t like being uncertain or confused, we seek answers and explanations, a pattern we can recognize to make sense of what’s happening around us. In the face of an elusive solution, or a mirky, messy problem, a lot of people are ill at ease.

This discomfort has driven invention and innovation for centuries. The need to understand and clarify and find an answer has opened the door to all sorts of advancements, especially in science and technology. In the long term, it’s served us well. Keep reading »

As Knowinnovation worked with the core team of NESCent funded project Phenoscape to organize a collaborative meeting last month, we stumbled upon what seems to be a growing challenge with the increase in the amount of data that is available to scientists: how to see and show that data so people can make better make sense of it.

We’d done some thinking in the area of visualization before; a few years ago we facilitated an Ideas Lab about biological imaging. One of the participants at that event was was Karl Gude, a teacher from Michigan State University who in a previous life was director of the infographics for Newsweek Magazine. He’s also a member of the team on one of the projects that was funded from that Ideas Lab, the Open Tree of Life. Keep reading »

Some people think that creativity is a bit of magic or genius – it can be – but we’d argue that it’s possible to be very deliberately creative by using a process. KI’s methodology is based on the Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS), a multi-step model developed by a businessman and an academic, in the 1950s. The premise is that creativity is not uniquely a Eureka experience, but that we can apply a deliberate method to produce new ideas and novel results. Creativity doesn’t have to be an accident or a bit of luck; you can do it on purpose. Keep reading »

So little time. So many fish waiting for a name. Brian Sidlauskas, an ichthyologist, was in Guyana charting the biodiversity of the distressed Cuyuni river. During a two-week trip, he discovered many endangered species. But to obtain a permit to export these unusual fish, he needed to provide the Guyanan authorities with a name for every specimen, many of which were unknown to him and his student assistant.

That meant work. Radial lines, scales on the lateral, rays in the dorsal fin and rows of teeth – all needed to be counted in order to come up with an identification for each of 5,000 fish. The length and colour patterns of each fish had to be examined, compared with known species and classified. Keep reading »

One of the hardest parts of being a facilitator is time-keeping. On one hand, our job is to guide people toward interesting conversations, to help them relax and get to know who’s in the room so they feel comfortable thinking out loud, taking intellectual risks and tapping into their stream of consciousness. That’s really the primary role of a facilitator, to set the stage for participants to have a different kind of conversation, with different people, to exchange opinions, develop new ideas and figure out how to work together.

At the same time, there’s the workshop agenda, a road map with several milestones. There’s a bit of give-and-take about exactly when these milestones get hit, yet in order to stay within a reasonable schedule, sometimes we have to drive things forward a bit. That means quieting the buzz of the room and moving on to the next activity. It might mean parking a group discussion, at least temporarily. It might mean pressing someone who’s reporting back to the group or making a presentation about an idea they have to come to a close. Whatever the case, it means interrupting. Keep reading »

Knowinnovation is typically brought in to help with collective creative projects, getting groups of scientists or academics or field workers to collaborate. But we know that when people leave our workshops, the creativity doesn’t stop. In fact, it has to kick into a higher gear to finish the work that was started, motivated by the individual rather than the group dynamic.

We’ve described what kind of workshop environment helps a group work more creatively and productively in a workshop scenario, but after that, when you return from an event, what do you go back to? Is it the kind of space that optimizes your thinking and your creative output? Keep reading »