We were lucky to be able to bring together a diverse, experienced and knowledgeable Critical Friends (CF) group to reflect with us on the project and the direction that this was taking, especially in relation to our collaborative and co-productive aspirations.
This blog reflection begins with a CF meeting that we had between the two initial project events (the first workshop brought areas together to talk about collaboration and project possibilities, and the second essentially asked areas to pitch their ideas/vision to us and each other). In this CF meeting we discussed how we were going to move forward and make a collective decision on which project/s we were going to continue support on.
As a staff group in Iriss, we aspired to be truly collaborative in our approach to decision making. In other words, we didn’t want to be the sole voice making the decision on which of the projects to take forward. Therefore, as we had discussed in the previous CF meeting, we wanted to hold a collaborative vote at the end of workshop day two, with all the project groups voting on which projects would be taken forward. This voting would be done based on short poster/oral presentations from each group that had been developed throughout the day.
However… the question came up in the CF group:
Will we know (and will others know) enough about the other partnerships to make a decision?
By employing this collaborative voting system we had hoped this this was the fairest and most transparent way of choosing ideas/localities to take forward. This was raised as possibly not being the case. Firstly, the CF group thought the other groups at the workshop wouldn’t have enough information to make their decision. Essentially they would have been voting on the short presentation made at the end of workshop two. They didn’t think this was enough to know the plans in a robust enough way. Secondly, there was a worry that a shared understanding was necessary between Iriss and the chosen group, but not between each other. In essence, Iriss has to live with the projects that were chosen, the other groups would not. If collective decision-making was employed, we would be ceding control of the direction of the overall work to people that may not be actively involved any further than this workshop day. This presented us with a tension between our hope to be transparent and collaborative, while still trying to retain our original project focus.
In the end, despite the CF reservations we decided to go ahead with the vote at the end of the workshop day. We tried to allay the CF fears in a number of ways.
- We set out a range of criteria for the groups to judge the presentations on. We presented these to the groups at the beginning of workshop two and sought their feedback. These highlighted the importance that we were placing on the vision and potential of the ideas, as opposed to being about concrete plans.
- We designed sessions leading up to the presentations to help the groups set their ideas out in a way that would help others make an informed decision (outlining things such as local assets, potential partners, appetite for collaboration).
- We decided that the final vote would give us a ‘top two’ that we would commit to working with until June 2016. After that time, we would make a decision on which area to continue working with. This would give us time to build a relationship with two areas and really get a feel for which would most benefit for our continued involvement.
- We offered continued support to the areas that didn’t get voted into this ‘top two’ and we are currently working on idea development with two of these groups (albeit to to a lesser capacity than the vote-winning areas).
In each group there were one or two Iriss representatives to help facilitate, and they also participated in the group decision-making.Each group had seven minutes to present and the other groups had the opportunity to ask questions afterwards. We then asked each group to collectively rank the other group ideas and announce their decision. These scores were accumulated in front of the groups and two project areas emerged as the chosen locales/partnerships.
As you can imagine, this had both pros and cons (my views only!!!):
Pros
- Voting criteria were identified and the groups were invited to add to/amend these
- The vote was collective and open, everyone could see how the partners were chosen
- A decision was made quickly to maintain momentum in the overall project
- The chosen groups felt valued and that their ideas held merit
Cons
- Understandably, directly after the vote, there were some disappointed people in the room that made for an unsettling atmosphere – work had to be done to keep the relationships with these groups healthy
- The vote outcome relied not only on the strength of the idea, but also presentation skill
- Even though criteria were outlined and discussed, groups were not held to account on how they put these criteria into practice.
Written by Stuart Muirhead