Learning Arts Blog

Workshops

Workshops

We are the kind of community that likes to share what we do - one way we get people together to share and teach is by having workshops.

Workshops ready-to-go:

Peter conducts Team Design workshops as a consultant and facilitator. See the Team Design book site at the Redesign Research website for more.

Patricia does creativity and writing/journal workshops from time to time. She loves to do big collaborations with other creative people - contact Patricia if you'd like to make something happen.

Workshop Offerings

Democracy and Decision-Making

Co-Laboratories of Democracy Global Agoras for the 21st Century

We believe the Information Age offers us a way to make participative democracy work today. Research and proven methodology aided by computing power has solved the basic dilemma of democracy: How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, dialogue about them, and still reach decisions and act on pressing issues?

The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Design Process (SDP) that the Agoras Institute calls "Co-Laboratories of Democracy." This process is a refinement of Interactive Management, which was developed over the last 30 years by John Warfield and Aleco Christakis. A book , Co-Laboratories of Democracy: How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power to Create the Future (2006, Information Age), explains this process in detail including its origins and the science behind it.

Team Design

For High-Performance Product Teams Team Design

Team Design facilitation provides a structure and model for organizing professional teams in complex design and planning. Team Design workshops include:

	Business Process Design	A "front-end" process that integrates the life cycle of activities used to identify, analyze, and redesign business processes. The agenda for Business Process Design supports a team in starting with an objective and completing with a redesigned business process.

	Requirements Definition	Another front-end format, that pulls together requirements analysis activities into a unified process. This format supports teams in evaluating the initial business requirements and working through to completion of a requirements definition. This can be considered the "design" of requirements.

	Application Design	This workshop integrates application analysis and design activities into a team workshop format. Application Design agendas support development teams in working from requirements to development.

	Team Planning	Planning is typically a front-end activity, but this workshop type can be used during almost any other workshop purpose. Team Planning supports group planning activities for strategic planning workshops, project planning and scheduling, and business planning.

	Decision Making	The Decision Making agendas support team decision processes, any of which might be used for product design or development, at any point in a business or product cycle.

Team Spirit

Team Spirit is the most effective high-performance team development workshop I've experienced. Although we have some experience facilitating Team Spirit, we recommend you go straight to the source, the Team Spirit website.

Creative Workshops

We facilitate creative workshops, including creativity work with professionals, and artistic creativity workshops for expanding and actualizing generative capacities.