WORKSHOP
Listen, empathize, listen and empathize again
Short overview:
The workshop will support participants to develop their listening and empathizing skills. Throughout the workshop, they will practice certain listening and empathizing techniques, such as surveys, interviews or visual thinking tools. At the end of the workshop, they will be more aware of the importance of listening and empathizing in any communication and social
interactions, and they will better value the information collected through asking more questions than through assuming.
Objectives of the workshop:
- To learn how to listen effectively and decipher meaning, and empathize with other people;
- To be able to use specific empathizing methods, such as surveys, interviews, visual thinking tools;
- To practice the articulation of thoughts and ideas, based on concrete data collected from other people.
Tell the participants that as young people they would have an important job to do for other young people. They need to come up with ideas to redesign the young people cinema experience, to make it cool again for them to go to the cinema.
To be able to do that, they need to investigate the current experience of the young people: what they say, do, what they think and what they feel about going to the cinema. Also, they will have to investigate needs and insights from the group of young people they want to help.
Start by collecting ideas from the participants on how they could investigate these above-mentioned aspects.
Note down their ideas on flipchart paper.
Video-projector and laptop if you choose to make a digital presentation
Present them basic information of empathizing step from design thinking process, and several methods of empathizing, they could use in real life, when trying to understand, discover needs and problems people face.
Use Google Form app
If you work with a big group, split it into four teams; if it is a smaller group, split it in two teams. In each team, there should be 5-6 people.
You will ask each team to think of 3-5 questions they will ask young people about their cinema experience, trying to find out their needs and insights. They will put then the questions in a Google form.
Pair the teams and ask them to exchange the surveys they developed with the other team. Each member of the team answers to the survey prepared by the other team.
Pair members of different teams. Their task is to interview a member of the other team and collect at least one story about the cinema experience (the best or the worst experience, or both; what made them give up going to the cinema or what made them go again to the cinema; a story about the cinema “competitor”, etc.). They need to “dig” in the story, and you should instruct them to ask many times “why”, to find out what is important for the young person, what does he/she want to accomplish with the cinema experience. Ask them to record the interview using their smartphones.
Use colored pencils or markers
Finally, each team will have to think to instructions they have to give to the other team so that they will draw something related to their cinema experience. For instance, one team could ask the other team to draw, individually: “What means cinema to them” or “Draw what you felt last time you went to the cinema”, etc.
After finish drawing, each team collects the drawings from the other team.
Use Flipchart paper & markers or Smartphones/ laptops & Google Doc app
Now, each team has a lot of information collected: the data from the survey, the drawing and the recordings with the stories. Ask them to:
- Read the 5-6 answers from the survey, and write down their first ideas about young people’s needs and some insights (what they said about their cinema experience);
- Each member of the team to listen to one or two stories recorded during the interviews (but not the story they recorded). Again, they should write additional information about needs & insights (what young people think and feel about their cinema experiences);
- Analyze together what young people drew, and try to decipher what they feel or think, and what is important to them. Write down the last conclusions from this analysis. Finally, the team should select the most important need they discover and a relevant insight from the data they collected about young people’s cinema experience. Each team presents the need and the insight they discovered. During the exercise they could collect the information on a common flipchart paper or on a Google Doc file.
Summarize, together with the participants, the steps of the process and the relevance of each step in the process - what new data, information they found out. Reflect also on the analysis process - the biggest challenges, the funniest moments, the “aha” moments, etc. Finally, reflect on the main learning objectives: to listen and empathize with other people, and leave aside any initial assumptions and show fully curiosity in the process and willingness to understand. You can write down the conclusions on a flipchart paper.
COMMENTS
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