If you have a spare moment, check out the work of Dave Gray.

Did you know 4.0

Dave harnesses his talent for visual thinking to creatively approach familiar problems and concepts in new ways. He founded a company called XPLANE. If the name sounds familiar, they are behind this movie about statistics around media convergence – you know, the one that tells you that there are 2 million TV sets in bathrooms in the USA:

Did You Know 4.0. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Gamestorming

You may have heard people raving about his latest book, Gamestorming: a playbook for innovators, rulebreakers and changemakers , co-written with Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. It details a number of thinking games to use with large groups of people to clarify ideas and find solutions. For anyone who has worked with improv theatre or even had any kind of hippy-ish grassroots organisation involvement, many of the techniques will be very familiar. The “button” exercise, for example is just an updating of the “talking stick” idea. There is a lot of sticking postit notes on butchers paper on walls like people sometimes do when deciding topics at the start of an unconference. The analysis of the types of thinking at the start is interesting. Do you want to narrow down ideas (convergent thinking) or generate lots more (divergent thinking)? Do you want to find consensus? Do you want to find relationships between ideas? Group like ideas and concepts to create nodes in a system? There is even a four page guide to drawing people at the start, as many of the exercises involve drawings to get people thinking or in response to ideas – and if you are communicating with people, then you will be drawing people..

It looks to be aimed at rather staid and traditional organisations, with a “look, you can fire up your workers just like those wacky kids at Google!” sort of delivery, but with serious business language and examples. It has hit its target market well and, from the regular search I have set up on the word #gamestorming on Twitter,  groups of people seem to be enjoying using the techniques in it.

The book is definitely worth reading and I would LOVE to get use some of the techniques with a group of librarians who want to stem the ebook menace / have free information literacy for all / easily expose as much as their local content as possible / collectively create a super professional development series / make our funding bodies increase our budgets by 10% / work out how to work best with museums and galleries and broadcasters / take over the world – or whatever else a whole bunch of smart and motivated librarians are capable of doing when they unleash their energy and superpowers in a channeled way…

Q-Tools

If Gamestorming sounds a little too involved, if you at all work in any kind of library, you should check out Dave’s post,Q-tools: An approach for discovery and knowledge work. It looks at different ways of classifying and refining questions. It is almost upside-down from the traditional approach of libraries, where we created taxonomies and classification schema for our “just in case” collections that were aimed at organising our potential answers.

The post looks at ways to create more effective questions in a world of indexed full-text and keyword-searchable “just in time” information online. This is like a taxonomy to use to classify and analyse the question you use to filter the information. The analysis is by methodology, how you want the answer sorted and refined technically – rather than the traditional “reference interview” types of questions that focus more on refining the subject and purpose of an information enquiry aimed at a single solution.

Here are his different types of questions. It is worth looking at the longer explanations and diagrams in the post.

1. A prism is a question that divides information into smaller groups.
2. A razor is a question that divides information into two categories, based on relevance.
3. A generator is a question that has a potentially unlimited number of answers.
4. A peeler is a single question that, when repeated, drives attention to deeper and deeper levels, like the peeling of an onion.
5. A flanker is a question that seeks patterns or ideas that are similar. The purpose of a flanker is to think laterally and find an analogous situation that may help you think about things differently.
6. A splicer is a question that combines information, or sets, into groups. The purpose of a splicer is to find larger categories and simplify collections of information.
7. A pointer is a question that has a well-defined or broadly agreed-upon answer, or set of answers. The purpose of a pointer is to gather specific information, for example: “What is your name?”

Post number 11 for #blogjune 2011