I was able to use my CoCreAct training in a workshop I facilitated yesterday for SoapBox Collective for their World Changers Innovation Challenge. The event had started on the Saturday, but my part was on the Wednesday when the students would be ideating and then prototyping their challenges. The focus on the event was to explore how they could help reduce the 1million lives lost each year through infection at childbirth by focusing on getting people to wash their hands more, or the help improve the maternity units for childbirth in Sub-Sahara Africa.

Using the CoCreAct process helped me set up a very exciting and useful day for the students, the others helping me with the teams, and the business mentors and judges who came along later. The steps you learn in the process isolate what you’re trying to achieve at each stage and ensure through useful suggestions how you can do that.

I established the challenge statements with the organiser, and then worked my way through the  steps to craft a good event with suitable ‘bursts’ during the brainstorming process to help get more ideas out of the students. It was a pleasure to see the effect each of the ‘extras’ had on the participants. Role storming was great and the volunteers had fun, while the forced connections with cards  was also very good at eliciting more ideas too.

All of this set up everything well to generate lots and lots of ideas from which to converge down to the seven ideas we needed for our teams. You can see more about the event at  https://twitter.com/hashtag/soapboxworldchangers2015?src=hash

It was a great day. It took longer than expected, but that was ok too. I can work on the timings and keeping people moving forward with more practice. The organiser was happy, the participants were happy too and I was happy with the result too. Tired, but happy.