Did you read the article about Flip in this issue? Here’s how you can modify this Live Online Learning Activity (LOLA) to suit your own needs.
The purpose of Flip is to encourage the participants to generate effective ideas. The activity uses a creativity technique in which the participants come up with ideas for achieving a negative goal and flip them around to achieve the original positive goal.
Sample Topics
Here are some examples of suitable training topics for this LOLA, each with an appropriate upside-down question related to the negative goal:
Change Management: How can you make life miserable for employees affected by the change?
Critical Thinking: How can you encourage participants to mindlessly accept everything you say?
Design Thinking: How can you ensure that everyone thinks inside the box?
Facilitation: How can you discourage participants from joining a discussion?
Listening Skills: How can you let the other person know that you are not interested in what he or she is saying?
Training: How can you make sure that participants don’t come to the session on time?
Trust: How can you reduce the level of trust in the workplace?
Webinars: How can you conduct the most boring, mind-numbing webinar ever?
Workplace Civility: How can you increase rude behavior in the workplace?
Design Steps
You can use the structure of Flip as a template for designing your own LOLA. Select a training topic that you are going to facilitate in the webinar. Then follow these steps:
Specify a positive goal. Write a key performance goal for your participants to achieve. Example: Facilitate employees to thrive under a major change.
Create a negative goal. Turn the positive goal around to create an undesirable negative version. Example: Make employees suffer under a major change.
Write a negative question. Create an open question that will elicit alternative ideas for achieving the negative goal. Example: How can we make the life miserable for everyone who is affected by the change?
Select a typical response. Come up with alternative responses to the negative question. Select one of these. Example: Announce the change without warning.
Flip the response to generate strategies for achieving the original positive goal. Take the typical response and flip it to come up with the opposite strategy. Come up with more than one flipped response, if possible. Examples: Introduce the change gradually. Get the employees involved in planning for the change. Set aside ample time to slowly implement the change.
Prepare a set of slides. Create slides with these pieces of content:
- Instructions to the participant
- The upside-down question
- A typical response
- Sample flipped responses
- Instructions for selecting and flipping the responses
Use these slides during the webinar session.
Creating the Facilitator Guide
You can write up the instructions for your activity by using our earlier writeup as a model. All you need to do is to replace any references to our topic (feedback) to your own topic.
If you are interested in tweaking the activity to better suit your needs and constraints, here is the Flip game plan that shows the framework:
| Step | What the facilitator does | What the participants do |
|---|---|---|
| Create two groups. | Assign the participants whose last names begin with the letter A through M to the Blue Group. Assign the others to the Red Group. | Remember their group assignment. |
| Present the question. Project the slide with the upside-down question associated with the negative goal. | Read the question and reflect on it. | |
| Explain the task. | Ask the participants from the Blue Group to type their responses in the chat area. | Blue Group participants type their responses. Red Group participants review them. |
| Select a response. | Choose a response that is similar to the response that you practiced flipping earlier. | |
| Demonstrate the flipping technique. | Show a slide with the original response and the flipped response. Explain the flipping procedure. Give additional examples of flipped responses. | Watch the demonstration. |
| Ask the participants to select other responses and apply the flipping procedure. | Give instructions to the Red Group participants. Comment on the flipped responses. | Select a few original responses and apply the flipping procedure. |
| Invite personal selections. | Ask all participants to select a flipped response for personal implementation. | Select a flipped response and plan for implementation. |
| Continue with the rest of the webinar. | Move to the next topic. | Listen and take notes. |
Alternative Uses
Creative problem solving. Instead of using Flip as a training tool, you can apply it in an actual problem-solving session. Begin with a problem that the participants are facing. Apply the steps of the activity. The end result is a set of ideas for solving the problem, ready for implementation.
Face-to-face training. You can adapt Flip for use in an instructor-led training (or problem-solving). Instead of asking the participants to type their responses in a chat box, ask them to shout out their answers and record them on a flip chart. Encourage teams of participants to select different responses and apply the flipping procedure.
Good luck adapting Flip to meet your needs. Please post a comment about your plans and results.