On Thursday Arwa and I were given the chance to interact with about 20 people involved in a trans-European study thing. There were folks from Greece, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria etc etc.They’d been together for four days, and had learnt a little about each other.  We showed them the basic ASK video, and the novice lines exercise video and then we went and did a bunch of them.

It went very very well.

As Arwa said, it’s basically very intuitive.  So, the challenge now is to help those people who have identified themselves as having skills to hook up more meaningfully with the people who want them.

That’s something we will be doing at an event in Manchester in late April. But it’s a bit of a secret for now, so if I told you more, I’d have to kill you…

Marc Hudson

Thanks to some recent opportunities to practice (shout out to JW), I have become a bit more confident at explaining the principles of ASK, with or without props. The “Novice Line” works v. well, it turns out.

On Friday night I had five minutes with 20 people. The room was just about big enough. I asked some people to move chairs, and as they were doing it, I said something like this (okay, less articulate – that’s the benefit of hindsight – you get to rewrite history)

“We have an amazing collection of skills and knowledge in the twenty people in this room. But we also have a problem. How do we find out what they are? If we ask each person individually what they are good at, what they would like to be good at, we will be here all week.
“That’s what Activist Skills and Knowledge – and the exercise we are about to do – is designed to solve.
“I want you all to think of one thing you are actually quite good at.
“Right, everyone on their feet please, and stand over there. [gestures to the left].

I then stood in front of them.

“So. This exercise only works if you are honest – not too modest, not too boastful. Think about how good a cook you are.
If you can just about boil an egg without burning the water, you’re a novice, and step forward to here.
If you can cook a meal for a few people without too much panic but with a recipe book, you’re a practitioner, and step forward to here (further along).
If you can cook for a dozen people on short notice, improvising as you go, then you’re an expert, and step forward to here (further along still).
If you get a phone call from an activist friend who says “Help! In three hours 20 hungry activists are going to be here after an action. 10 are vegan, two are gluten intolerant and one gets very very angry if there’s no meat. I’ve got 80 quid for the lot” and you don’t bat an eyelid, then you are a ninja, and come forward to here.

So everyone did it and it was awesome.

I explained the provisos
- that you’re better off learning from someone who has stepped forward just a little further than you, rather than from a ninja, who may well have forgotten what it is like to be ignorant
- that (white) men overestimate themselves, and that women are trained to underestimate themselves (generalisation, but not a huge one)
- that you can be a novice/practitioner at something and if you’ve no desire or need to improve, why the heck SHOULD you?

We then did it with “explaining climate science” (no ninjas, one expert, many novices) and with gardening/allotment skills.

All in about six minutes…

Did it with cooking first because a) the room was almost entirely women, and – given the patriarchy – many of them would be good cooks, and I wanted to get them stepping forward, feeling able to be proud.

Lessons learnt
Always have your novice to ninja colour sheets with you.
Always have copies of the ASK flyer with you
7 minutes is enough to really explain this system.

Just had what – for me, and I think for the other participants – was a very very useful session.

I started it by getting everyone to turn to someone they didn’t know and have a quick discussion about one thing they were good at (to write down on white paper) and one thing they would LIKE to be good at (write down on green paper).

Then, after as brief an intro of self as I could get away with, I started in on some icebreakers.

Did first one by date of bith within a year (i.e. Jan 1st at one end of room, Dec 31st at other, people self organising). It got conversations going, and sure enough, there were two people who shared a birthday.

Then into male and female lines based on height. Got the tallest man talking to the tallest woman and so on.
Then got the men to stay in place while I walked the women around in a “snake” so that the shortest woman was then talking to the tallest man.

I got them to talk about their skills and wants (from the papers, which I had by this stage collected).

Then showed them the two videos, which seemed to have worked very well. Everyone “got” it straight away.

We then ran novice lines on a bunch of topics (including climate science explaining, which we shouldn’t have done, because it mostly wasn’t a climate crowd).

Then there was even time and energy (within the hour!) to do small group work – got dif groups tackling different questions.

I learnt a new way of dividing people into small groups too (thanks Evita!)

Someone with a stop watch agreed to start applauding at the one minute mark, and we whipped through some really great observations…

(Thanks to all spokespeople, and especially to the group who had each of them talk for about twelve seconds, delivering a message in both what they said and how they said it. Kudos!!)

More to follow (about foul-ups from me, stuff I could/should have done better)

Massive thanks to all who participated, who recorded it/tweeted it, and to Jo Wilkes for the opportunity.

Points
In some ways it was an “easy” crowd because they are self-selected highly motivated to learn. Mostly young, mostly I think used to small group work, being asked to speak, to get on their feet, to mingle.

On the flipside, there were potential language and cultural issues.