#Billboarddesignthinking Anti-Corruption Workshop Template

I view weeks ago I had an internal workshop for training purposes, and we decided to talk about corruption that plagues many countries and societies. And as always being very na?ve I thought that would be a super cool workshop to explore how people think about corruption and how it affects their lives.

The workshop was super interesting but the result was very surprising to me.

Reflecting on what had happened I think there are three interesting lessons I can share from the workshop with you.

Lesson learned Nr.1: if you don't have 100% trust you can't have an open conversation and your workshop will probably fail.

I often argued that Design Thinking workshops are safe places for participants to share all their thoughts and they know that ever word that is spoken stays in the room. It's like an implicit agreement that those information’s won't be used for exploiting personal gains. In addition in all my documentations I have a paragraph in the introduction explaining that the outcome is a result of group work and I don't care which person mad what statement.

All results are based on team work and the team is always responsible not a single individual.

In a normal business environment that never seems to be a problem. I have moderated several workshops where I was surprised how open participants would communicate internal problems, infighting, wrongdoing and internal politics problems that prevent projects from starting or being successful. The group had agreed to have an open discussion because that's the only way they will achieve results justifying spending time together.

When talking about public corruption it seemed people where not keen to share personal experiences

People were saying things like: “We all know who we mean we don’t have to say his name loud everybody knows he is corrupt or bribed." But at the same time I observed that participants wanted to share information but not in a very open way. I already saw my workshop failing and not achieving any meaningful result at the end of the day.

Actually, the first signs emerged when introducing the workshop topic because the group was arguing if the word “Corruption” is permissible or if we can find another word that is not so negative sounding.

I insisted that if we want meaningful results, we must talk about corruption without pointing fingers or blaming specific people. The objective was to make the underlying structure visible not to judge specific individuals. The aim of the workshop was to find solutions how to change the system not real persons.

For me it's not about moral and personally I don't care who steal how much money it's about finding a better and more efficient way to do business and corrupt societies always underperform. If a society is less corrupt all are better off, business people, politicians and the society as a whole. It's a win-win-win situation for everybody.

While I always knew trust is important, I think this was the workshop where the trust issue was almost physical visible in the room.

Lesson learned Nr.2: If trust is missing people don’t like to write and visualize their thoughts.

When discussing about why post-its will always be important in design thinking workshop my main argument always is post-its are like personal signature underneath the statement written by the participant. This assumption that handwritten notes are a very strong personal statement even worth more than spoken words proven once again to be 100% true.

A post-it with my handwritten is a statement similar to a signature

Usually I insist participants have to write their own post-its but this was an unusual situation. The interesting observation here was that participants were openly talking about corruption but were not eager to write down what they were talking about. So, I decided to do the writing for them which nobody objected to and I ended up writing about 50% of all post-its.

Lesson learned Nr.3: Never give up and follow your plan no matter how hopeless achieving the goal appears to be!

I was wondering several times and seriously doubting if we would make it to the end of the poster to formulate a value proposition and project plane to kick the project. But continuing writing insights on post-its and putting them on the #billboarddesignthinking poster participants started to see the power of visualization and the workshops started to move in the right direction.

By the time we finished the eco-system map participants started changing the conversation from "That won't ever happen" to "Maybe it can be done".

In the end we had a very nice result and the participants called in their line manager to present what we had spent on full day discussing. When they summarizing the entire workshop it was clear that we achieved something that made sense and is worth while pursuing.?

I'm convinced without the clear goal and the poster we would have given up and stopped the workshop going home with no results and a bad feeling.

If you want to give it a try here is your one day workshop schedule

Here is the png you can send to the print shop when organizing your Anti-Corruption workshop.

I asume the problem matrix, persona, context and stakeholder mapping as well as the eco-system mapping value proposition and project plan need little explanation but the four standards steps for bribery schemes is one of the things I learned in the workshop and needs a little explanation.

1)????Set up bribing schema: Is done long before the actual money flows and in many cases long before the public or private tender is announced. This is the time where entrepreneurs, companies and officials search for potential projects they can exploit and hijack.

?2)????Tender manipulation: once the parties have agreed which project they will go after they try to influence the tender, so the only logical winner is the company they are supporting no matter if it is a public or private tender.

?3)????Contract signed money flowing: Once the contract is signed and the project is started the project owner is invoiced?and money flows back to the bribe.

?4)????Project end / money disapears: After the money is spend the project is either stopped or additional money is allocated to continue finishing the work that was already payed for but was not delivered. The second option is simply stopping the incomplete project and walking away.

Perhaps you know people who care about bribery and want to do something.

If you know influential people who object to corruption and would like to spend a day investigating what they could do about corruption in a design thinking workshop I would suggest give them a call and invite them.

Without blaming anybody specific I guess there is a large city in Europe starting with the second letter in the alphabet where several Anti-Corruption #Billboarddesignthinking workshops would render potentially interesting results that might save public tax payers several billion Euros each year?

If you want the original PowerPoint template I will share it in Billboarddesignthinking LinkedInGroup https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/8780360/

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