Global Flipchart #12

By Wiebke Herding

For decades, Aberdeen has been seen as the ‘oil capital of Europe’, and as the basin matures, the region is transforming itself and focus on technology innovation and development for the energy industry. We spoke to Nikki Tierney, Innovation Hub Manager for Oil & Gas TechnologyCentre (OGTC)  in Aberdeen, about the role of facilitation in delivering this paradigm shift.

What is the Oil & Gas Innovation Hub?

The innovation hub is a workspace that is entirely dedicated to workshop design, delivery, facilitation, and collaborative working. It’s a combination of the physical space, some excellent collaborative technology (software and hardware) and a dedicated in-house facilitation team. It’s not just a funky room, it’s the all those elements together that make it valuable.

In general, our remit is around supporting and invigorating innovation for North Sea oil and gas. This is in response to a lot of challenges in Aberdeen: the drop in the oil price, maturing fields, shifts in industry.

Why is facilitation and collaboration so important for you in this process?

One of the continuing shifts in Aberdeen are the bigger operators transitioning fields to smaller, leaner organisations. We’re also moving towards decommissioning some of the earlier platforms. The Wood Report of 2014 made it very clear: we need to move a more collaborative working structures & behaviours if we want to maximise economic recovery. We want to find out: how do we work together in a more agile, more modern way to realise the potential that we have here? One of the main roles of the innovation hub is to bridge the gap between the small innovative companies that develop new technology and these great big operators, and help them work together in a meaningful way.

Where does technology come in?

Because we’re focusing on innovation and a technology shift, we decided to go 100% digital with our facilities: nothing happens on paper. We had the luxury of designing everything from the ground up: We have a full, 6x2m interactive wall, and we have four breakout areas with touch screens. These walls all speak to each other. Everything has moved on from paper, post-its and markers. We use all the same facilitative approaches, we just do them electronically.

Typically we’ll have a group of up to six working together on a 55 inch touch screen and using it like a pinboard with brown paper and post-its or a flipchart, or a visual template - depending on whatever tool we want that interactive screen to be on that day.

How do participants react?

Really positively, to be honest. People spend maybe 5-10 minutes finding it a bit uncomfortable - and then they’re off and running. What really helps is the integration of all the technology. It’s not one tool - we have a lot of different things that are all talking to each other, so it’s a very comfortable and - from the facilitator’s perspective - it’s a very clean environment. You don’t have to download things, you just come in and get work done. Even though it’s digital, a lot of the interaction feels analog. So if you’re used to paper, it still feels like that. We’re not taking that feeling away from people and this is really critical for the participants’ experience.

Where do you see the added benefits of using digital tools?

The ease at which you can transfer learning is huge. As a facilitator, you can reuse templates and so on. There’s so much less prework to do once you’ve set up your library of tools.

We work with this software called Bluescape that creates an infinite canvas of work. You have all your work on there, and elements are visible for as long as you like. And then as people are walking out of the room you can instantly share that wall with them by sending them a link with all the results. Participants can go back and review and enjoy the workshop as it evolved during the period of that workshop.

You also have so much more rigour because you can see how an idea came about, got bounced around and developed over time. The information is immediately available. You no longer have this experience where participants get a report weeks after the workshop with someone else’s interpretation of the results. Having that level of evidence behind our decision-making process gives robustness to all our output.

It’s very liberating as a facilitator, because everything that I need is on the canvas, good to go. I no longer need to create new concepts or materials on the spot, I don’t need to worry about whether I’ve got things in the right order … it’s all there. Once you’ve done your prep work, you’re so free in your session to switch things around. If you want to work linearly, you can - but you also have the option to revisit work or to jump forward without a lot of scutter during the session. It’s a very freeing way of working.

Typically, our workshops include a lot of input. You can upload all reports and presentations onto your canvas. If a breakout group needs to refer to something it’s right there. You’re basically building a whole picture that you can then navigate around as you wish. This gives you a lot more flexibility to engage with your participants’ different needs.

What technology is behind this and why did you choose it?

We did a lot of research, looking at different pieces of software and different pieces of hardware. We figured out quickly that the concept of different breakout groups being able to share information with the different interfaces around the room was really important. It was also important for us to be able to equip people who weren’t physically in the room to participate effectively. Personally, I think this will absolutely be the way we work together in future.

There are many tools that can do one thing really beautifully. What we learned was that we actually just need a simple tool but with an accessible, intuitive interface that allows us to handwrite and allows us to notecard, and share documents, visuals and video. Bluescape allows us to do this.

With these tools you get what you pay for. Be very clear on what you actually need. For example, there are these beautiful touchscreens these days: phenomenal accuracy, handwriting, pencil drawings. In the end, we realised we don't need that level of sophistication. We need to move things around, contribute notecards, and mark up drawings. We worried about so many things in the original specifications, that we have now realised we needen’t have worried about at all. The fundamental workshop tools are all really straightforward! That’s been a great learning for us: have a really good look at the level of sophistication that you're looking for and don’t worry about things you don’t need.

What challenges did you encounter with this?

One of the biggest challenges for us is to engage remote participants - there’s so much you lose when someone isn’t in the room. How do you have to rethink all your practices so that they resonate with people working remotely? You cannot translate what you do face-to-face into a remote environment. You need to build a new skill set to do that.

We also had some trouble with devices. When we designed the space, we set up a bank of tablets that workshop participants would collect on their way in. We struggled to make that part of it successful. The minute you hand someone a tablet, you lose them. It’s the antithesis of asking people to turn their phones off. You’re handing them a tool which has to be on wifi and leads them to everything else but to presence and connection.

That said, we are finding them very useful for more personal moments in the sessions such as relfection or individual contribution when you want to avoid group-think. They also work really well for transactional moments, like for voting exercises or reviews. When we want more person-to-person engagement, we focus on group work at the large screens and less on individual input.

What tips do you have for fellow facilitators?

First of all, be really clear on what equipment you want, who will be using it and what will they be using it for. This might be stating the obvious, but it's amazing how challenging this can be. One of the fundamental things to consider is repeat visitors: do people have the opportunity to learn through repeated use, or do you typically have single visit users?

And if you are a freelance facilitator, I would say just get started on the best tablet you can afford. There is so much out there that you can use, so start playing with it! Start to build your own toolkit, such as templating, electronic instruction flipcharts, shapes, notecards and so on. And of course, you can use it both analog and digital if you want to transition gradually. Printing out your electronic templates works well in this phase and can cut down on repeated pre-work if you capture a few of your favourites.

It’s a good idea to get really familiar with the visual facilitation toolset: templating, digitising and so on. Take the time to really learn the software packages you choose to go with. Familiarity is the first step to mastering the skill. It gives you the freedom to experiment. It is a great way to start building your digital toolset and you become familiar with software, with hardware and tools. And it's just a really nice entry point.