I’m in St. Louis today, attending a meeting of the advisory board for eMINTS which is always a source of new ideas for me. We spent last evening working our way through an activity called The Implications Wheel, something I’d never heard of. Our task was to generate some insights into the future. What lies ahead as eMINTS continues to grow? What are the opportunities and perils that lie ahead?
We were broken into tables of 4 or 5 people. Each table had a mix of backgrounds, and each group was given one first-order implication to deal with. From that we had to think about at least five things that might happen next, and from each of those second-order implications we had to do the same thing again. With all the brainpower in the room, we were able to surface a lot of important issues and it was interesting to see how some of the same basic themes came up all over the room, even though we each had a different starting point.
I’m usually a bit skeptical about group processes like this, but the Implications Wheel impressed me as a technique with a lot of potential. When time permits, I want to read up some more about it.