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For approximately 19 of the 20 years I’ve been in the resilience and emergency management profession, I’ve taken part in discussions which revolve around two common questions – what is resilience and what should we be doing to improve it.

This is a story about an activity I ran today on that. Skip to the session outputs if you want, but I have tried to outline my thought process and reflections too.

Why are we here?

After a merger of two teams working on broadly similar areas (but specifically very different activities) some months ago, this subject raised it’s hand again. Sometimes that was in a very obvious way, like a ‘virtual hand’ being raised Microsoft teams, and somebody in the team would explicitly question ‘what’s the purpose of doing this’ or ‘what are we working towards’. Other times it’s been more unspoken, and there has been a question hanging in the air that everyone is itching to ask but nobody has quite made it that far.

In an effort to move forward and work on alignment of the two former teams, the leadership team decided it would be helpful to invite everyone (approx 30 people) together for an afternoon to work through what our vision should be, start to develop our mission statement and consider the range of responsibilities that we have collectively and individually.

Each of the leaders took an element of the afternoon, and I volunteered for the ‘mission’ session.

My overarching objective was to try and bring some creativity and energy to a subject many of us have considered previously. I also identified some sub objectives, that this session needed to be interactive, needed to provide an opportunity for people to work together and needed to be an activity that provided a level playing field and avoided the more senior people dominating the discussion.

On the Future Leaders Scheme, we used Lego to construct ‘the leader we wanted to be’. There were varying qualities of construction, but two aspects which were very interesting were the different approaches that different people had, and the level of thought and interpretation that people had put into their creations.

A (sad) lack of any significant quantity of Lego immediately scuppered this plan, so I considered how else we might be able to create a similar set of conditions and some other options before finally settling on a ‘magnetic poetry’ activity….you know, the kind of thing that you find on a refrigerator, like this:

I don’t know everyone on the team to the same degree, but of the people that I do know there can sometimes be some cynicism about ‘off the wall’ ideas. I knew that if I was going to go down this route I would need something in my back pocket to say ‘this isn’t just some wacky idea, there is some evidence to using poetry in the context’.

A recent blog from Sam Illingworth at London School of Economics was one of the first articles I found. In it, Sam states that “the integration of poetry as a pedagogical tool offers a unique way to enhance learning experiences…poetry can transform approaches, deepening understanding and engagement” which sounded promising.

The post links to a couple of articles, so I had a quick scan of them too to pick up some further evidence that this was a legitimate activity in case challenged.

• Camille Cronin and Caroline Hawthorne in the 2019 edition of ‘Nurse Education Today’ examined the use of poetry in healthcare education as a reflective tool. They found it provided an “opportunity to express emotions and experiences more freely”.
• Sam and colleague Kirsten Jack wrote for the journal Arts & Health in 2023 that, poetry enabled “alternative perspectives” to emerge, “challenging previously held assumptions”, but that the use of this tool also created empathy and facilitates “social bonding, feelings of universality, and mutual understanding between group members as they find common ground in poetic expressions”.

In the blog, Sam also provides 5 tips for adding poetry to the pedagogical toolbox (poetry as a medium, make it accessible, focus on process, create a safe space, be vulnerable).

I then found the excellent work by Clare Morgan in 2010’s book What Poetry Brings To Business, which sets out some factors which I found really helpful for developing this session with the team, and drew on some of them in the feedback, which I’ll get to a bit later.

• A poem is multidimensional which develops our ability to detect different modes of meaning and to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty.
• A poem doesn’t offer closure – this teaches us to handle non-resolution.
• A poem isn’t based in a logical deductive mode and so we learn to make associative connections.
• Poems can show the ordinary as extraordinary which encourages us to question givens and makes us more aware of complexity.
• A poem is almost infinitely interpretable and can help us to consider the views of others, to recognise that ‘meaning’ is unstable and to examine and revise our current insights and perceptions.
• A poem operates at different levels of accessibility which could enable us to detect weak as well as strong signals and to seek less obvious linkages.
• A poem is full of coexistent complements and contradictions which could develop our ability to time judgements carefully and be aware that binary thinking is not enough.
• By drawing attention to human needs and motivations poetry could help us to make decisions in a more comprehensive context and address ethical issues.
• By exploring emotional complexity poems could help us develop the ability to offer wholeness of response.

Preparing for the session

Having convinced myself there was a sound evidence base, I set about planning the session.

I had 30 minutes allotted in the afternoon’s agenda, and knew around 25 people would be attending. So that everyone would get chance to contribute I worked out the best group size would be 3-4 people.

Using an online ‘word cloud’ tool, I drew out the 50 most common words from each of two documents which various team members currently use to guide our way. I then asked ChatGPT to suggest another 50 words and then used a bit of judgement to add some additional words (including some that I thought might generate some additional discussion), bringing the total to 163 words. It looked something like this.

As well as my snazzy tablecloth, you’ll see that 36 words are highlighted in yellow. These were the words that the leadership team had used when talking about this session and I thought that might be useful to track them, so highlighted them.

I then spent about an hour or so carefully cutting each of the words out and creating 8 packets, for each of the groups to have. I debated whether different groups should have different words, but decided that it would be more interesting if everyone had the same options to see how different their products were.  After a period of time my kitchen looked like this…

Although each of the groups had the same set of words, I did give them slightly different steers and asked them to hold in their minds the idea of a theme running through their poems. I had drawn these themes from a quick look through the sessions on values and responsibilities which I knew were also being planned. In total we ended up using six of the themes:

• Community
• Assurance
• Partnership
• Our Power
• Our Approach
• Consistency

Creating Poetry

I opened the session with a quick introduction and run through of the rules. I had tried to lightly script this, but at the time it felt like it was too much instruction and people just needed to get on and play – so I adjusted my remarks on the fly to set out the bare minimum. I drew back to Sam Illingworth’s blog and tried to reinforce that there were no right answers and the important thing was to have a go rather than worry about the ‘perfect’ poem.

I then went around to each group to pass on some additional information, outline the rules and check their understanding:

• Create as many mission statements as you can in the 20 minutes we have
• You must use at least one yellow word in each statement
• You can re-use words – so if you have already used a word in your first statement, but want to use it again that’s fine
• You have permission to create a funny or silly statement (because I know what you’re like), but you can only do this once!
• Assume alterative forms of the provided words are included (e.g. communicating, communicated, communicates)
• Connecting words are free, use as many as you like, but remember that poetry isn’t prose

I was delighted that people got stuck straight in.

Seeing the different approaches that groups took to the task was fascinating in itself. Some groups were really structured, turning all the tiles around the same direction, sorting out the yellow ones, categorising them and grouping them. Others embraced the chaos of a mixed up pile, taking a more intuitive approach.

I think some groups took a little while to figure out how they would approach it.

After 20 minutes had elapsed I drew the group back together. I first asked if there were any words they had been provided with which had stood out, in particular words they had chosen to discount. I was surprised that only one word was challenged by an individual as I had definitely tried to include some to provoke that consideration. A useful personal lesson perhaps in assumptions about what and how other people think.

What was produced?

None of this is formal organisational policy at this stage, merely the product of a workshop session, which will need to be refined and calibrated against other things. However, there were a couple of things which stood out to me which I share for interest.

The group which was thinking about the theme of ‘assurance’ created a whirly poem which spirals and changes direction halfway through. Perhaps a sub-conscious comment on the convoluted process of assurance?

The group prompted to consider the theme of consistency were the first to grab some blu-tac and start to put words onto a page, filling in blanks and adjusting the words that had been provided to fit their purpose. Perhaps a genuine suggestion, but I suspect that this suggestion from the group considering ‘our power’ was their wildcard!   And the final example, which I think is great, is that the group asked to think about ‘our approach’ came up with an acrostic-style creation. 

 

Final reflections

The setting for the activity (and the whole afternoon) was excellent – a dance studio in a railway arch! I think getting out of the normal work environment was also a big factor in us thinking about things in a different way.

There is more work to be done to make sense and consolidate what we produced today; in part that non-resolution is linked with Clare Morgan’s observation that, in themselves, poems don’t offer closure and are the starting point for thinking more deeply.

However, I think it was a useful session. It got people talking and creating, I think it revealed a lot about how meaning is subjective (both in the sense that you and I might interpret a word or phrase differently, but also the observation that how words work when used in a ‘community’ sense might be very different to using it to talk about ‘consistency’). It was also an excellent way to see which leaders naturally emerge within small groups, different problem solving approaches and to generate discussion on sharing perspectives.

If you’d be interested in my complete list of words then let me know and I’d be happy to send them to you. Best to reach me via @mtthwhgn.

Finally, as I reflect on this session today, I’m also drawn back to previous thoughts I’ve had about zines. In particular, I wonder whether they are/could be a useful mechanism for creating information in new, decentralised and more inclusive ways. It’s not something for now, but if that sounds interesting let me know and I’ll put a bit more time towards thinking about it!