By Annette Boaz
Twenty years ago, at one of the first research workshops I held for stakeholders, a participant from the local community put up his hand and asked when we were going to start making something. I obviously looked confused so he picked up the workshop flyer and pointed to the word ‘workshop.’ “You make things in workshops don’t you?” he asked.
At the time, I took this as a lesson in choosing your terminology with care when working with diverse groups of stakeholders. However, on looking back I wonder if I missed something else. Was I so pre-occupied with my own standard practices of meetings that I failed to see that his comment might have been as much about my ways of working as my choice of words?
Fast forward to our first meeting of the SESYNC Co-creative Capacity pursuit in April 2016 in beautiful Annapolis, Maryland, USA. We are talking about co-creating knowledge for service improvement, but are we about to fall in to the trap of developing ‘business as usual’ approaches drawn from our own professional practices? However, the conversation takes a turn and we are talking about drama, art, dance and (in my case) building with LEGO.
