In this post: an update on my Innovate project; where I am and how I’ve got there; plus an offer of FREE TRAINING!

I’ve had a lot of time over the last few months, since first putting in my bid for Innovate funding, to think about what I would come up with as a “training resource/training game” on the themes of collaboration. I followed the advice that I give in workshops on creative thinking, and decided to give myself time and space to have lots of different ideas before committing to one.

My friend, and all-round excellent skills trainer, Jen Allanson gave me some great advice when we were swapping info on projects that we were working on: “think about what you want people to get out of this, not what kind of a game you want to put together.” This proved to be hugely helpful advice; after spending weeks of putting together notes and ideas on card games as and when they occurred to me, and reading through Thiagi’s “Design Your Own Games and Activities” (hugely helpful, and a great resource), I started to apply some critical thought to the ideas that I had, and in the end one idea came to the front.

Which is great! Of course, it means that there’s still a fair amount of work to be done: polishing that idea up; setting up the mechanism and the resources; putting together the actual physical sets that I’ll use for playtesting the resources. But going from wondering at the start of the week what the “game” concept is going to be, to knowing the outline and the nature of most of the components a few days later is very satisfying.

I want to start playtesting the resources, and that’s where YOU come in, dear reader! I’m looking to run sessions on collaboration using the Non-Zero-Sum resources as the main feature, in order to test the resources and tweak them before they are submitted along with the reports to Vitae in the spring. If you would like me to come and trial these with a small cohort of your PGRs for FREE then please get in touch – all you have to provide are willing participants, some refreshments and give me some feedback afterwards! I’m currently looking to do this in January and early-February, so please get in touch.