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Branches, leaves and aviation?
“We’ve certainly got a lot of branches…”, “Oh how leafy that topic is…” and “Look at all the colourful leaves…” were all phrases that came up in our most recent workshop on aviation with stakeholders.
Your first thoughts may be what on earth do branches and colourful leaves have to do with aviation but let’s just say that this was one of the starting points for the design of the last workshop we ran for the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) and Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) on the topic of aviation.
Designing a workshop can be a lot of fun as well as quite challenging. We started with the idea that we wanted to do a series of ‘mind maps’ with three groups of like-minded people and then bring all the mind maps back together and compare the differences and similarities. But there was one problem: our venue did not allow for huge sheets of paper to be hung on the wall and then displayed together for everyone to see. This is where the idea of using a tree analogy came into play.
We started with the trunk ‘Aviation in a low carbon sustainable society will…’ and from here each sector group was given a series of A1-sized boards. Each of these boards represented a branch and groups were encouraged to describe on them ‘What aviation in a low carbon sustainable society will be’. From here sector groups were encouraged to divide into smaller teams to discuss the ‘How it will be achieved’ under each of the branch headings they agreed. These were written on A5 sheets of paper which - you guessed it - became the leaves. The leaves were all colour-coded according to the sector group that created them.
The room was buzzing with discussions from all three groups and the facilitation team was breathing a little more easily given that the experiment of using the tree analogy worked – sometimes one has to take risks.
What did it achieve? It enabled everyone to see the main issues, how they link to each other, and the elements of each issue that will need to be addressed and resolved if progress is to be made. This sort of mapping is an essential first step to planning how to tackle such a complex tangle of issues.
But what did the tree really look like you ask? Well, they say pictures speak a thousand words so we have included some below.
If you are interested in seeing the outcomes of the aviation workshops we would encourage you to visit the SDC’s website on aviation. The transcript from the workshop we have described above will be available on SDC’s website shortly.
