Great evening courtesy of LBi for hosting and @Leisa for organising.
Dave Gray told an interesting story over Skype of a meeting at the World Bank where all the participants were basically far too high status to get excited, so even getting them to draw along was a success, especially when someone reported getting an insight from an exercise.
Walking back with @JeffVanCampen and @JaremFan I remembered the scary moment when I’d had an opposite problem. I’d flown over to the USA to do a prototyping workshop (we didn’t talk about co-design back then) with a client just outside Chicago. I was using a client server programming tool called Applications Manager, and the participants in the workshop were basically the users of the existing 3270 terminal based system, and while they were good at their jobs, these women were not exactly forthcoming when I started asking questions about how they worked - in fact, I was getting an echoing silence.
We took a break and their line manager, who seemed just as decent, ordinary and un-showy as the rest of his team, ordered coffee and sent out for doughnuts. At the end of the break he told his “girls” to sit together down the front of the room and - to my astonishment - switched down the lights. When we resumed, huddled round the projector screen like a tribe round its camp-fire, I started asking questions again and suddenly voices started coming out of the dark.
Not a technique I’ve every had occasion to use since, but a team and a moment I’ve always remembered with a sense of awe and gratitude.
