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Sep 15 2023

Facilitando mediante Estructuras liberadoras

Hay cinco «microestructuras» convencionales principales que usamos de manera predeterminada en nuestras organizaciones y grupos:

Presentaciones
Debates moderados
Informes de estado
Discusiones abiertas
Lluvia de ideas

El problema con estas «microestructuras» es que son demasiado restrictivas (en el caso de presentaciones, debates moderados e informes de estado) o demasiado flojos (en el caso de discusiones abiertas y tormentas de ideas).

Estructuras liberadoras-EL (Liberating Structures) es una selección de 33 «estructuras» alternativas para facilitar reuniones y conversaciones .

Las Estructuras Liberadoras introducen pequeños cambios en la forma en que conversamos, planificamos, decidimos y nos relacionamos unos con otros. Resitúan el poder innovador y facilitador, en el pasado reservado sólo a expertos, en manos de todos. Treinta y tres microestructuras adaptables hacen que sea rápido y sencillo para grupos de personas de cualquier tamaño cambiar radicalmente su forma de interactuar y trabajar juntas. Las Estructuras Liberadoras pueden sustituir o complementar esos cinco grandes enfoques convencionales que usamos todo el tiempo (presentaciones, debates moderados, tormentas de ideas y discusiones abiertas). En contraste, las EL están diseñados para incluir y apoyar a todos en la configuración de su propio futuro.

Las Estructuras Liberadoras, por otro lado, están diseñadas para adoptar el control distribuido e incluyen un número más justo y mayor de personas en la configuración de los próximos pasos. Sus beneficios son la innovación, inclusión, participación, claridad, propósito, diversión.

No se necesita ser un/a facilitador/a (profesional) para liderar estructuras liberadoras: Las estructuras liberadoras son deliberadamente simples y cualquiera puede dirigirlas, lo que significa que pueden propagarse viralmente en una organización o grupo. Una vez que haya experimentado un@, es muy fácil comenzar a experimentar.

En el post de Nadia von Holzen “El poder mágico de Estructuras Liberadoras: una mirada más allá de la caja de herramientas hacia los principios”, nos contaba sobre los 10 principios de Estructuras Liberadoras (EL). Estructuras Liberadoras es más que una caja de herramientas. Es un enfoque, una mentalidad, una filosofía, una forma de pensar, colaborar, ser y liderar.

Estos son los 10 principios de EL:

Practica el autodescubrimiento dentro de un grupo (1).

Aprende cayendo hacia adelante (2)

Participar en una curiosidad lúdica seria (3)

Puerta de entrada: Con este espíritu, la caja de herramientas es la puerta de entrada al mundo mágico de Estructuras Liberadoras. La mayoría de las estructuras son increíblemente fáciles de aprender y aplicar

Buceando más profundo. Se trata de estructura pero amplifica libertad y responsabilidad (4): Necesitamos estructura, alguna forma de límite, que cree espacios, oportunidades e invitaciones para encontrar soluciones y dar forma al futuro juntos.

Se trata de interacción. Incluyamos y demos rienda suelta a todos (5) Se trata de personas

Practiquemos respeto profundo por la gente y las soluciones locales (6)

Creemos confianza en el camino (7)

Seamos «posibilistas», enfaticemos las posibilidades: intentemos creer antes de ver (8) Se trata de colaboración, co-facilitación, co-creación:

Invitemos a la destrucción creativa para posibilitar la innovación (9)

Nunca empecemos sin un propósito claro (10)

Los diez principios mencionados destacan lo que se vuelve posible cuando se utilizan estructuras liberadoras para estructurar las interacciones cotidianas.

Encontremos otros centros de gravedad…permanentes (o no).

Fuentes:

“The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures” por Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless

«What are Liberating Structures?» Lisa Gill

Sep 14 2023

What Does Reproductive Justice Actually Look Like?

In Loretta Ross’ essay “What is Reproductive Justice?” in Reproductive Justice Briefing Book: A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change, Loretta writes: “Reproductive Justice can be used as a theory for thinking about how to connect the dots in our lives. It is also a strategy for bringing together social justice movements. But also, […]

The post What Does Reproductive Justice Actually Look Like? appeared first on Nicole Clark Consulting.

Sep 13 2023

How to Evaluate your Reporting

If you are serious about creating better reports, it’s time to take a step back. In this post I’m going to share my F.R.E.D. method for evaluating modern report dissemination.

But let’s start with something I’ve learned slowly over the last two decades of my data design career.

The biggest problem with most evaluation, research, and data reports is NOT the quality of the charts or visual design of the report. The biggest problem IS that most reporting is not designed to reach and engage an audience.

You can create the most interesting, delightfully designed, value packed report and still fail at reporting. Because if that report does not fall into the hands of your target audience, that report will not have an impact.

So how do you assess whether or not your reporting is reaching your audience?

You can use my F.R.E.D. method.

Why tracking PDF downloads is not enough.

PDF downloads is a pretty lame measure without any additional context.

It tends to be used like any other vanity metric (ex. social media followers). Without knowing how many people are in your target audience, which members of your target audience actually know your report exists, or even how many members saw your download page (without downloading), it’s just an out of context number.

Is 100 downloads good? What about 1,000 or 10? Any of these can be an absolute success or disappointing failure. But if you don’t do a little extra work, you won’t have any idea of what success looks like.

What is the F.R.E.D. method?

F.R.E.D. stands for Frame, Reach, Engage, Deliver. These are the four basic steps I would suggest you follow when evaluating your reporting efforts.

For the sake of this post I am going to assume you are actually interested in report engagement and uptake. I’ve talked about this a lot in recent presentations, like the Eval Cafe I delivered for the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan. There is a big difference between a technical report and the kind of reporting designed for reach and engagement.

Let’s walk through each phase one by one.

FRAME your audience.

For a lot of evaluation reports the audience is either unidentified, a laundry list of disconnected groups of people, or generically described through the use of blanket phrases like “the general public.” It’s often nebulous or just a bunch of wishful thinking.

I would suggest that for each and every identified audience type, you should be able to identify by name a specific member of that audience. If you can’t, you’re likely too disconnected to actually reach that audience. That is, if it exists at all.

Once you can name your audiences, try to frame them.

For one of my projects I was working with evaluation teams in ~66 individual state or local jurisdictions. For each team I could anticipate an average of 3 members. So in total, I would have an audience of about 198 (we’ll make it easy and round up to 200).

Additionally, we had other stakeholders that were part of our the broader audience. Around 20 members associated with the client and perhaps 50 more who were loosely connected.

I can total these audiences, but it’s actually more valuable to keep them separated. But running with this example, let’s say I have 270 members overall. Getting 2,000 downloads of a report would be incredibly bizarre and probably mean I reached outside my target.

Whom do you REACH and ENGAGE?

I’ll talk about these two together as the data for each is usually found in the same place.

REACH

A report reaches potential audience members when it shows up on a social media feed, inside their email inbox, or within web search results. You can REACH an audience member via social media even if they do not follow your account. You are not guaranteed to REACH an audience member just because they follow your social media accounts or subscribed to your email list.

REACH stats can be influenced through a good social media campaign, so it’s a good number to track.

REACH stats include Impressions, Opens, and Keyword Search Volume.

ENGAGE

A reader is engaged when they perform some action when seeing your report. This means they did not simply let it scroll by on their social media feed or mindlessly mark it as read in their email inbox.

ENGAGE stats can be influenced through content design, such as infographic design and copywriting.

ENGAGE stats include Reactions, Comments, Reposts, Retweets, Clicks, and Expands.

Finding REACH and ENGAGE stats.

You’ll find reach and engage stats mostly inside of your organization’s communication platforms.

For instance, inside of LinkedIn you can see post impressions and view analytics for any of your own LinkedIn posts.

You can find the same information in Twitter (now X) by visiting analytics.twitter.com and logging into your account.

Most email providers will also give you data on recipients, opens (or open rate), and clicks (or click rate).

There are a number of tools that exist that allow you to see search engine stats. One of those tools is called Ubersuggest. Here you can search your page and find out its usual position in Google search results.

Based on the keywords where your page is found, the search volume for that term, and the relative position on the search page (lower the better), Ubersuggest provides you with estimated visits.

When is the report DELIVERED?

I like to think of reporting as a conversation but generally there is a desired reporting output. Historically the key DELIVER stat is often downloads.

If your report exists in HTML you could also consider unique pageviews as a key metric. Then, if you would like to dive deeper, you can look at other stats like time on page or bounce rate.

If the bounce rate is high, it means people are visiting the page but not diving any deeper into supporting content. If the time on page is low, it means people are leaving quickly and not likely digesting much of your report.

If you do decide to still deliver a downloadable PDF, that will also give you additional stats. You can find out how many people downloaded (or registered to download) your report. You may also learn how many people visited the page where your report is set to download.

TLDR Recap

Frame your audience: Try to identify real humans and come up with actual numbers to estimate audience size.

Whom do you reach? How many people actually noticed your reporting (ex. impressions & opens)? What percentage of your total audience had an opportunity to engage with your reports?

How many engaged? Of those who you reached, how many engaged with your work? This could be things like clicking on links in your emails or engaging with social media posts.

How many reports were delivered? Given the number that engaged, how many people actually viewed your web report? If HTML, how long did users stay on the page to read? If it was downloadable, how many were downloaded?

All of this information can be used in the future to help you improve your report delivery. Or in the present to be more strategic about reaching missed audiences.

More Resources

If you are more concerned about the quality of your reports, and not your reporting strategy, I have a guide for that as well. It’s my User Experience evaluation approach to evaluating dashboards, reports, and data visualization. You can download the eBook by following this link.

Sep 13 2023

Don’t Start from Scratch! Make One of these Dashboards Instead

Dashboards aren’t supposed to take forever.

They’re not supposed to cost an arm and a leg.

They don’t even need to be outsourced to a consultant.

Dashboards are supposed to be fast and easy. We make ’em quickly. We give the numbers to leaders. They make data-driven decisions. That’s it! Stop overthinking it.

In this article, you’ll see examples of real dashboards that you can use as inspiration for your own workplace. No need to start from scratch. Adapt one of these dashboards instead.

Grant Deliverables

In this blog post, you’ll see how Josephine Engels did need to start from scratch — she was visualizing these metrics for her organization for the first time — and then made several dashboards to track grant deliverables.

Josephine writes, “My colleagues have given very positive feedback, as the dashboards have made it easier to analyze their program data more comprehensively. They especially appreciate one-pagers that can be shared with different stakeholders, including board members and program collaborators.”

Board Packets

In this blog post, you’ll see how Kristen Summers used “better storytelling with the same data” to transform a couple packets for her board.

Kristen writes, “This resulted in a much more well-received document with lots of compliments from board members! I have begun creating a cohesive aesthetic for all the documents I produce for the board to give them the information they need but in the most streamlined way possible.”

University Monthly Reports

In this blog post, you’ll see how I transformed a university library’s monthly report.

I write, “The before version only looked at one month at a time… I visualized the percentage of the goal that had been achieved so far… In some areas, the library has already exceeded their goal, so the bars spill past the 100% mark—a cause for celebration!”

Quarterly Monitoring

In this blog post, you’ll see how Shawna Rohrman designed “a prettier and more effective dashboard” with Excel.

Shawna writes, “Even with just these few changes (and using a program nearly everyone can access!), our new performance monitoring dashboard has made it so much easier for our team to review quarterly progress in one place and visualize how our system of early childhood programs are working for children and families in the county. The dashboard has become a quarterly staple at our staff meetings, where we review as a group and use the data to generate next steps. It is also easy to share with senior leadership, so they can see at-a-glance the important work our programs are doing.”

Agency Progress

In this blog post, you’ll see how Danci Greene, Emily Rose Barter, and Britani Baker used “an iterative process to hone the perfect data visualization.”

They write, “[We] recently used an iterative process to turn my agency’s annual goals document into a dynamic visual dashboard… Our iterative process has taken us all the way from a Word document to this dynamic, visual dashboard that uses length and color to bring the numbers to life.”

Revenue and Expenses

In this blog post, you’ll see how “transforming your pie charts into a dashboard – built in good ol’ Microsoft Excel – can be more useful for your organization’s leaders.”

I write, “The pie charts and bar charts above were only giving the viewers a single snapshot in time. To manage effectively, leaders need to monitor trends over time… Viewers should never have to lay two pages beside each other or scroll through documents to make comparisons.”

A Tired Data Table

In this blog post, you’ll see how Mia Schmid revamped a “tired data table” that “did a terrible job of communicating what we needed to know.”

Mia writes, “This is a huge improvement to how we have tracked organization-wide goals! The dashboard is so much easier to read compared to the table format and is a much more engaging way to communicate our progress than merely throwing a bunch of numbers into a table and expecting staff to make sense of it. This dashboard also communicates more than just progress towards goals. When I first put this dashboard together I was struck by how many of our programs either exceeded or under-achieved on their goals for 2017. Goal setting is one area we have been working on with each program and this dashboard has also enabled us to communicate to leadership why appropriate goal setting is so important—achieving a goal by 349% signals to me that the target set by the program is questionable.”

24 School Districts

In this blog post, you’ll see how Amadu Sidi Bah visualized 24 school districts’ submissions with a dashboard in Excel.

Amadu writes, “On sending this final dashboard to the project manager and colleagues, the project manager sent a reply in less than five minutes, and I quote him: ‘…Wow, comprehensive and nice visuals! This should help us prepare for the Review Team meeting and help shape the option paper.’”

Family Trivia Event

In this blog post, you’ll see how Emily Ross used dashboards “to make a family trivia event even better.”

Emily writes, “I can’t wait to continue to apply the tips and techniques I learned both at work and for fun! Maybe at next year’s trivia I’ll have to test some of the dashboard designs for comparing change over time.”

Learn More

Want to transform your tired tables into effective dashboards? Learn how inside Dashboard Design.

Sep 12 2023

Consejos para la facilitación de grupos

Dentro de nuestra serie sobre «Facilitación«, completamos el post del gran facilitador y persona Ewen Le Borgne «10 mandamientos de la facilitación grupal«

Como él mismo indica y queda claro en su forma de facilitar, a Ewen no le gustan las reglas. No le gustan las limitaciones. Sin embargo, en contra de sus principios, y por suerte para nosotr@s, simples mortales sin tantos principios y necesitados de guía(s), Ewen nos ofrece sus «mandamientos» de facilitación.

Aquí están sus mandamientos o consejos:

1. «Mantengámonos alejados del contenido, gestionemos el proceso»

El papel de un facilitador es reflejar el mantra “ayudar a todos a pensar lo mejor posible”.

2. Seamos la única persona que trabaje ABSOLUTAMENTE en el interés de TOD@S

Al centrarnos en el proceso y no adoptar ningún sesgo en ninguna conversación involucrada, el facilitador puede liberarse para prestar atención a cómo lo están haciendo todos y proteger el espacio seguro y el tiempo de todos para expresarse.

3. A lo largo del camino, desarrollemos para todos la «alfabetización del proceso«

Como facilitador@s poseemos una sólida visión, mucho conocimiento y o habilidades críticas del proceso.

4. Siempre que podamos, involucremos y co-facilitemos con otr@s, preferiblemente personas que sean miembros del grupo con el que estamos trabajando. De esta manera, no solo estamos compartiendo un poco de alfabetización del proceso con tod@s, sino que desarrollamos, fundamentalmente a través de la experiencia conjunta con ell@s, gran parte de ese proceso de alfabetización con personas que desempeñarán directamente un papel co-facilitador en el proceso.

5. No nos enamoremos de nuestros propios intereses, deseos, aficiones, no se trata de nosotros sino de ELL@S

Cuando trabajemos seriamente con un grupo, respetemos nuestro compromiso con ellos y sigamos pensando continuamente en lo que hay para ell@s.

6. Recuerda tu yoda interior: abraza tu yo ético

Cuando estemos en la sala, facilitando, no tenemos espacio para colorear nuestras declaraciones política o éticamente. Pero antes, al diseñar el proceso, tenemos derecho, y quizás deber, de seguir nuestro propio código ético: pensando particularmente en cómo ve la dinámica de inclusión, diversidad, representación, toma de decisiones transparente. Seamos muy conscientes de cómo se contribuye a un entorno y una dinámica saludables (o no tan saludables) en los grupos con los que trabajamos al no hacer algunas preguntas críticas por adelantado.

7. Seamos conscientes de quién somos: el «yo como instrumento»

Conócete a ti mism@ y trabaja contigo mism@ en la sala. Sepamos qué es lo que desencadena tanto positiva como negativamente. Lo que es probable que nos haga más entusiastas y menos avers@s a los riesgos, y lo que lo desconcertará. Cuanto más nos conozcamos a nosotr@s mism@s, con todas nuestras debilidades y fortalezas, más podremos servir a los demás de manera plena e incondicional.

8. Seamos la facilitación que se quiere ver en todo lo que hacemos.

No limitemos nuestra práctica de facilitación a los eventos y las iniciativas de colaboración en las que trabajamos. Apliquémoslo a nuestra vida, a nuestro trabajo y siempre que sea deseable a nuestras relaciones personales. Brindemos apoyo, seamos útiles, escuchemos activamente, seamos conscientes de los resultados, seamos colaborativos.

9. Autorreflexión y superación personal

“Aprendemos fallando hacia adelante”. El pensamiento de crecimiento impulsa a l@s mejores facilitador@s. Y además, es posible que necesitemos la retroalimentación de otros para ayudarnos a cubrir nuestros puntos débiles y ayudarnos a crecer, lo que allana el camino para el último, pero ciertamente no el menor de estos mandamientos …

10. ¡Trabajemos con (muchos) otros y seamos agradecidos!

Facilitar es inherentemente colectivo. Ya sea que ayuden a diseñar, co-facilitar, documentar, administrar el tiempo, administrar las plataformas técnicas, revisar los trabajos, cuanto más involucre a los demás, más activa se vuelve toda la multitud y es más probable que inviertan más de sí mismos en el tiempo que pasan juntos. y en la construcción de relaciones de calidad entre ellos.

Sigamos soñando con trabajar en grupos y con facilitar la colaboración