For this year’s first Hive Toronto Meetup, we delivered a workshop called “One Collaboration Doesn’t Fit All”. Hive Toronto is a network of youth-serving organizations and inherent in their culture is collaboration. It is about this network working together to do more. And yet we have all been in one too many collaborations that didn’t pan out for one reason or another.
Bringing together design thinking and best practices about collaboration, Jenn led a hands-on and participatory workshop for participants. The workshop was scheduled for 2 hours, so participants were really only able to get a quick taste and introduction to design thinking. The goal of the workshop was to demonstrate some of the existing collaboration group dynamics that appear in everyday collaborations through somewhat fictitious and extreme challenges.
Here are some of the challenges that groups faced:
- Collaborations formed based on minimal shared goals
- Working through a task without knowing the teams strengths or weaknesses
- Directives given in step-by-step rather all at once
- Sudden changes to plans
- Short timelines
Divided into groups, teams were asked to:
- Elect one person to come select 2 pieces of paper
- Create a mindmap connecting these two words
- Identify possible areas for solutions
- Elect one person to come select a final piece of paper
- Work to understand their user
- Come up with ideas to solve their user’s problem
- Present their idea and receive feedback