Activities are a substitute to social awkwardness

I have hosted multiple Generalist World ↗️ meetups so far, some in Bengaluru and a few around the world. While many of my previous meetups were just casual coffee meetups with some conversation prompts to kickstart conversations, this time I tried to do something new - host an activity, and not just any activity - A Design Thinking activity called “World Cafe”. I was trysting myself to find a good problem statement, and wasn’t sure if solving Bangalore traffic would be a good problem statement. Nonetheless, I went with it.

“How might we envision a Bangalore where travelling between places is effortless and instant?”

On the D-Day, I expected a modest crowd of 15 people. And instead of hosting this event in a cafe shop, I got a dedicated venue just for us. Thank goodness I had a dedicated venue as around 24 people turned up (including me). We had a round of introduction (and that for a while) and then i introduced World Cafe activity. There will be four tables with one table head (whose job is document ideas that come up in the table) and the participants will pick one table for one round and move to different tables in the next rounds. Each round is for 15 minutes and ensures that everyone has a chance to absorb ideas/pollinate ideas at different tables.

What turned out was an hour long engaging activity with participants discussing on how to solve the problem and also identifying individual passions among each other without formally introducing themselves. They also got to see different degrees of ideation across different tables and with different set of people as this ensured that they saw both bold and crazy ideas to more grounded and boring ideas. I also noticed how a few participants who were introverts got to contribute too, without having to muster the courage to interact with others (if they didn’t want to), but just by listening to other people’s conversations and adding to them or by documenting the ideas that were brought in. I felt like an accomplished man at the end of the event. It I definitely have things to improve to get better at instruction delivery, or even lighten the mood at times, it was a big step for me as I organised an event of this size.

I felt like an accomplished man at the end of the event. It I definitely have things to improve to get better at instruction delivery, or even lighten the mood at times, it was a big step for me as I organised an event of this size. In the future, I plan to have more events. I think design thinking activities are good as these events are for generalists, who love to wear multiple hats, and are great at problem solving. Some ideas that I have in mind:

• Socratic Seminar
• Marketplace
• Snowball Discussion