A week ago on Saturday 12th April I facilitated a workshop at ACCU2014 on Imagination in Software Development which I am pleased to say – thanks to the participants – went very well.

Before the workshop I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew, having read through a lot of Iain McGilchrist’s book “The Master and His Emissary” and realising that using analytical thinking for such an exercise is very difficult. However thanks to my long suffering team at work giving me the chance to do a dry run, I was able to get feedback about what did and did not work and so ended up making some rather last minute changes. The final workshop format ended up being completely different to the dry run.

Before moving onto the exercises I gave a half-hour talk about the links between phenomenology; software; and brain hemisphere function, most of which in hindsight could have been left until after the exercises. My main objective, however, was to raise self-awareness about the participants’ internal imaginative processes.

I thought it would be good to highlight some of the primary ideas that came from the exercises, both in terms of the workshop’s preparation and its execution.

The need to get away from the software domain

The exercises in the workshop involved:

• Listening to a story excerpt from a book.
• Watching a film clip of the same excerpt.
• Performing a software design exercise individually.

Each exercise was followed by discussions in pairs. It became abundantly clear that if you give a bunch of programmers a technical exercise, it will behave like a strong gravitational field for any ideas and it will be very difficult to get them to focus on process instead of content. Indeed during the workshop I had to interrupt the pair-based discussions to make sure they were talking about their own inner processes instead of the results of the design exercise I had given them! By reading a story and watching a film clip first it did make it easier to highlight this as a learning point since it was much easier to focus on internal process for the story and film clip.

Individual working instead of in small groups

The trial run with my team at work used small 3-4 person groups. I found that the team dynamics completely overshadowed their individual awareness. I therefore changed the format to make the core design exercise an individual process, followed by discussions in pairs. This had the desired effect of bringing their internal processes into sharper focus. The more you know about an area the more difficult it can be to “go meta” about it.

Some great insights from the participants

STORY
When listening to the story 3 processes were identified which occurred in parallel:

• Visual – Picturing.
• Emotional.
• Logical – Probing.

FILM

• The film was much more emotionally powerful, to the point of feeling manipulative.
• But it was felt to be ‘weaker’ due to the imagery being concrete.

DESIGN

• When performing the design exercise the ideas were experienced as a story, but as a sequential process rather than a parallel one.
• The logical analysis required thoughts to be made explicit by writing them down otherwise it was hard to hold them in awareness.
• There was a more conscious awareness of past experience affecting current ideas.
• The initial analysis was wide-ranging followed by focussing down to the core ideas.

So if any of the participants make it to this page – I would like to say a great big thank you for getting involved.

Slide set follows: