​​​​​BEYOND NUMBERS

If you’re only using quantitative methods to understand your performance, then you don’t understand your performance!
In this playshop, we talk about why impact and performance measurement distorts its results and creates perverse incentives for your team.
We experiment with ways to identify gaps in your understanding—everything from changing “lenses,” to taking note of who’s “not in the room”, to making collages.
By the end of the playshop, you will design down-to-earth, rigorous research methods so you can understand what’s really happening in your programmes.

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MIND OVER MACHINE 

The robot overlords have taken over your organisation and they’re keeping your team from doing deep, effective work.
This creative, problem-solving playshop is the antidote to both tech refusal and tech overuse. Using lessons about technology from Plato, your team will diagnose the root causes of dysfunction and start treating tech products as a symptom that’s easily remedied. We will use games based on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto to find ways to work with technology to make us more human, and more effective.

TALKING TO MEN

We need to talk about men and boys—
– how we’re hurt by expectations to act tough, to take charge, and to be sexually assertive.
– how we go on to harm ourselves and the people around us by refusing to complain, express emotions, show affection, or ask for help.
But when men do try to talk about the challenges we face today we’re told to “man up”, or to be grateful for our privilege. Both of these reactions shut down the conversation.
This playshop uses discussion and games to delve into bel hooks and Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist analyses of masculinity and offers the conceptual vocabulary to talk about men’s problems without overgeneralising or reasserting rigid gender roles.