Journey to Kinderland - Setting the Creative and Innovative Mindset

There were challenges running the MINDEF Innovation Game between 2002 to 2006. One of these was the organisation of workshops for large groups (more than 50 participants). With the configuration of 2 facilitators to every 5 players, I had to muster 10 facilitators to run an event for 50 players in the early days when the game was introduced into the organisation.

Subsequently, one of the players was made to helm the role of the 2nd facilitator but this arrangement affected that player's learning cycle. In the later years, I had the players trained in the mechanisms of the game so that they run the game with me and in their sub-units but there were reservations about their effectiveness in debriefing their participants.

Having facilitators at the table continued to be problematic (The mechanisms of the game could have been changed since I left MINDEF in Feb 2007 and these historical legacies may no longer impact it.)

From the lessons learnt from those few years of helming the game for more than 1,000 participants from MINDEF and many other public sector organisations, like MOE and MinLaw, it dawn on me that creating another game with simlar characteristics may not be viable for the private sector. I found another approach, in June 2007, that gets me out of this constraint of balancing learning effectiveness and organising efficiency.

Takeaways from Journey to KinderlandTM

Journey to KinderlandTM is a game, which consists of a series of 9 activities (to be expanded to 20 in the future), that provides players a new way of exploring their own personal and interpersonal barriers, in an experiential way, to creativity and innovation . The activities open a window into their subconscious mind and see how it operates. The game provides a language that helps them distinct and catches the triggers that control their thinking and behaviours that have prevented them from fully realising their personal potentials.

I had used 4 of the 9 activities with LTA (2007 & 2008), NACLI (2007) and recently with MICA (2008). The outcomes have been very encouraging. The mechanisms of these activities have proven to work. Besides their abilities to consistantly evoke the same behaviours sets, deem necessary as opportunities for the debrief after the game, they also generate the same category of deep learning amongst the players. Because each activity is self contained, players enjoyed the activity without the intervention from the facilitator until during the debrief period. As learning is modularised, the introduction and acquisition of the language is specific and faster although the debriefs have to be conducted by a skilled and experience faciltiator. Still. this is a breakthrough from the confines of the original innovation game.

The Happy Family Game

One of these activities is the Happy Family Game, which is a card-based exercise where participants learn about how we deal with the known and unknown.

2 x 2 Grid of Knowns and Unknowns

Throught the card-based exercise, participants learn that:

We Pretend We Know It All But Really We Don't

We often see the Future seen as a continuation from the Past. From this perspective, many of us attempt to deal with the future by strategising and planning as if we already know how the Future will unfold.

However, all known futures are actually hindsights. Those futures that we know before their occurrence are just predictions. Honestly, we are clueless most of the time. The reality is that all events in the world could be grouped into 4 different categories and the future is unknown to us. It requires a set of strategies and behaviors, which is different from those we are using now, to deal with it effectively.

Understanding these can give us the freedom to create the breakthroughs in our ideas and actions……

Another exercise conducted at the workshop is the Old Macdonald Sing-along. Participants learn that there is:

Meaning Making Machines

More than a Conversation in a Conversation

Unaware to us, as we speak to someone, we are in more than a conversation. In fact, there are five other conversations taking place at the same time. Conversations that we are not even consciously aware of.

What we are present to in any conversation are those things we can hear and see. However, there is also this conversation that only we can hear. Sometimes, we even verbalise and act out some part of it. This is the world of the internal conversation. This is the conversation of 'yes' or 'no', 'should' or 'shouldn't,', 'right' or 'wrong', 'whys', 'cannot be?!' and many more. This is a conversation of evaluation and decision making. This is the conversation where meaning are being made. This conversation is capable of stoping us from doing something.

The scary part of this conversation is that it is the loudest.

This acticle was 1st written on 6 Nov 2007 and updated on 14 May & 23 Oct 2008.

Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.