Our passion is to make life in organisations and communities meaningful and real. This is practical work – turning what’s not working into something effective.

No conferences with interminable speeches, when you just long for the coffee breaks and the real conversation. No distant suits talking at you and seeming to ignore any needs you may have. No messages delivered from platforms or top tables on high, to you in the ranged rows below.

No Town Hall meetings with officials behind a table, the community in uncomfortable chairs in serried ranks and verbal brick bats being thrown from one ‘side’ to another.

No meetings with many-pointed agendas, sending to sleep or to day dreaming, at least half the participants at any one time – each hanging on for the only meaningful moment for them – the AOB!

No organisations with mission statements decorating the walls, work/life balance and diversity policies lining the filing cabinets, while the real practice leaves people wondering why they are there and whether their needs will ever really be met.

It’s time for real human beings to talk to each other. Real conversations to make a real difference… moving to a world we want rather than stuck in misunderstanding or the stalemate of opposition.

This is Making it Real, in practice. Smiles and animation replace downcast faces, absenteeism, resignation and apathy. Commitment to getting things done replaces whinging and mud slinging from ‘the other side’.

It not only works to live and work this way… it’s a lot more fun!

So how do you make it happen?

Here are a few instances of how we, in Wikima, Make it Real.

All the programmes we create with our clients involve:

• Real work
• Real experience
• Real relationships

Real work
We consciously design our programmes for ‘high learning and high play’: high play being the fastest way to high learning. Providing for all learning styles, our work is deliberately creative and almost always involves elements of Right Stuff – the creative arts and other ‘right brain’ approaches.

For many people the work we undertake with them appears to be far from ‘business as usual’ in the office. And… make no mistake, this is no ‘fluffy stuff’. It is genuine real work done in fundamentally different ways.

Real experience
This is about giving people a whole-person real experience of working in new ways together. Not just talking and thinking about it. Doing it, and being it – now. So the formats we meet in and the methodologies we employ, while addressing the real work and issues, are in themselves modelling the environment and experience of doing things differently from now on. Living the future now.

Real relationships
Again, everything we do, from the moment those involved in the work first meet each other, is designed to create real relationships. We meet as the real individuals and human beings that we are; relating to each other in the ways we always wish to and yet often somehow perhaps don’t believe are possible - with mind, body, spirit and emotions all playing an acknowledged part. Life is too short, and our organisations in too great a need of flexible and powerful people, to be putting up with relationships of pretence.

So how do we Make it Real when we work with a desire for:

• Meaningful visioning
• Genuine engagement
• Purposeful partnership
• Collective commitment

Meaningful visioning

To be genuinely meaningful and real, visioning has to work at the level of identity; asking questions such as:

• Who are we?
• Who do we want to be?
• What do we want to be / do / have?
• How do we want to be:
  • to fulfill ourselves?
  • to make a difference?
  • for financial success?

To access the real answers to such questions requires a variety of creative approaches, usually involving the ‘right brain’ – for instance:

• drawing
• creating poems and songs
• enacting a future vision
• dancing
• using masks
• visualising
• storytelling the future
• creating a Vision Fair of future ideas
• EHAMA community making, using ‘earth wisdom’ tools.

This can be an appropriate time to mix the professionals (actors, dancers, storytellers, artists etc) with the people. Again, this is far from ‘soft stuff’, it’s getting to the real nitty gritty of what matters to people – and fast. While rational considerations can certainly contribute to imagining the future that’s needed and wanted, we would consider touching what’s real through these ‘right stuff’ activities as essential.
It’s about being in the future now!

Genuine engagement

For us, the key to this is in the mix:

• Max-mixes: during programmes and events, max-mix means having people work together in groups that represent microcosms of the whole system (whole organisation or department or community). This makes sure that conversations in the participating group are likely to be reflected in the whole. When working with large groups (for example several hundred people at one time), everyone may be sitting at round tables of eight or ten: at each table will be a max-mix of all those in the room, which itself will either be the whole system, or a microcosm of the whole system. During table conversations, everyone will hear different points of view and get a sense of the whole picture: this also helps clarify people’s own minds.
• Whole humans: this is again about remembering to acknowledge and incorporate the fact that people are mind, body, spirit and emotions. They will not be engaged on the level of mind only. Let’s be honest. Let’s be real.
• All learning styles: the field of research and understanding about how different people learn is enormous. A couple of examples: the natural learning preference for many is not sitting reading a book, or being talked at and then discussing it - which is why school is not always a productive time, and why conferences of speakers (however eminent) tend to be appreciated most for their coffee breaks. ((see Open Space Technology for a story))

Secondly, as we know from NLP/NAC and other models, we take in information through our five key senses, and each of us has a different balance of preference for our primary sense. The key senses in learning are Visual (eg. seeing a drawing or symbol or someone doing something); Auditory (eg. hearing someone speak); Kinesthetic (eg. getting a feeling sense, physically or emotionally). In designing programmes that will genuinely engage, it’s critical to take such differences in learning styles into account.

• Variety of forms of engagement. Variety is the spice…. and so it is in programmes of work. We need to change pace, venue, who we’re interacting with, the nature of the work, and the type of activities we’re using to address the work. Is it any wonder that speech after speech in a darkened room with PowerPoint slides on a screen, tends to send many normal human beings to sleep?
• Mix of venues. We all know the value of getting out of the office for an awayday or strategy session? If we’re looking to change our ways of seeing the world and relating to each other, doesn’t it make sense to do this in different surroundings? And, the more unusual the better in many cases. When it comes to public participation, a mix of venues is extremely important in giving the maximum range of people the best possible chance of attending: that’s a mix of venue styles and location.
• Varied days and times + ‘sleeps’. Offering different days, and times of day, is particularly crucial in public participation work, in order to engage the different constituents. Those who work may naturally prefer a Saturday, and yet families have their week-end needs too, so a mix is best. In communities and organisations, the number of days allocated to any one piece of work is usually influenced by cost and especially the time people believe they can take ‘off’. Naturally the longer people stay together, the greater the depth of work that is possible and the stronger the relationships that will be developed. The value in spending evening time together, whether purely social or in an activity, cannot be overstated. An overnight transition is also highly productive, in allowing ideas to ‘cook’ as people ‘sleep on it’. Marv Weisbord (the creator of Future Search) always recommends ‘two sleeps’.

If you create these kinds of mixes, you’ll be on the way to engagement that works. Other contributions to real engagement include:

• a clear purpose for the work
• a wholehearted belief in it
• a genuine belief in the ability of the people to do the work they need to do
• a vibrancy in supporting and facilitating the people.

Purposeful partnership

When you Make it Real, partnership is not just a tired word.

The key for us is:

• Agree a clear and motivating purpose. Create it together, and keep it as a genuine beacon to guide the work you do together.
• Commit the time and energy to do whatever team-building is needed… and do this in the context of real work. Team-building activities of all kinds, indoor and outdoor, can be valuable and enjoyable: make sure they are directly related to this team and it’s work together. Good briefing and de-briefing of any such activities is critical.
• Agree the principles you want to work by: these relate to deep questions of values, beliefs and attitudes. The work to establish the principles of how we want to be and act together will in itself be valuable in growing a real partnership.
• Be clear on your agreements. Hold each other to them. Review them and revise them as needed.

Unfortunately, partnership does not just happen (or rarely anyway)… it’s like any real relationship, it needs some working at. And that work can be enjoyable too.

Collective commitment

Like partnership, getting real about commitment, means going beyond blind hope. To make it work, requires taking conscious action. For instance:

• Getting people to sign-up to the actions they are willing to commit to. The more people demonstrate their commitment in public, by physically signing on a sheet, sticking dots against their priorities, or speaking their commitment out loud, the more it is likely to become a reality.
• Create practical processes for demonstrating commitment. Don’t leave it to chance.
• Encourage champions to self-select and step forward to lead action. The best people to take things forward and those who really care.
• Give proper support to those who commit. Be prepared before a programme to provide appropriate resources: be clear on what are the ‘givens’ – the boundaries of what may be possible. Provide relevant administrative support to teams taking action forward: some form of central co-ordination will almost certainly be needed. Express and demonstrate appreciation for those who are taking action.
  

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