If you haven’t already read part 1, start there. It’s important context to what follows.
The session led by Peter Bryant, Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps on the fictional University of Banford was a little bomb of chaos detonated at the heart of the RIDL conference! I mean that in a positive way, something done in a playful and disruptive way that had a serious message at its core and that created a lot of impact.
I don’t want to over-explain what the session was ‘cos, y’know, SPOILERS! What the 3 facilitators have created is an immersive and detailed fictional story experience by inventing an imaginary university, putting session participants into the role of employees of said institution then throwing a series of increasingly frantic and contradictory challenges at them as a provocation for discussion.
That doesn’t do the extent of the whole thing justice. In an effort to create a compelling scenario, a huge collective effort has gone into creating the materials and activities. You can get a flavour by spending a bit of time exploring the University of Banford website. Warning: it’s a bit of a rabbit hole. Hats off to all involved.
The University of Banford is a scenario that the facilitators talk about being “hyper-real”. There are elements of satire, seriousness and some jokes but it’s all intended to reflect real current or near-future situations just dialled up for effect. Speaking to Lawrie about it he’s commented wryly about how it’s a challenge to stay ahead of real events. Elements intended to be slightly absurd have a habit of happening in real life forcing some nimble re-thinking.
So how does the experience of the Banford session help to answer the question I asked myself in part 1:” what if we went all in on creating imaginary worlds and situations as a way of understanding and changing the real world?” What was it like to be part of this exercise?
Banford is an emotional experience
Listening to people talking about the session afterward, I noticed reactions like “entertaining” and “stressful”, sometimes in the same sentence. It’s a bit hard to classify what sort of activity this is. It’s more than a workshop, not fully scenario planning and not a creative writing exercise like Neil’s session (see Part 1).The closest thing I could come up with that gets close to its immersive nature was a theatrical role playing exercise.
A potential risk of creating a hyper-real scenario like this is that it calls on people’s real life experiences which may feel very uncomfortable for some.
Part of the way the session deals with that is by emphasising the role playing element. You’re not you, doing your role. You’re someone else, doing someone else’s job in a place that doesn’t exist and there’s a process of “induction” into the scenario to demonstrate we’re moving into a different psychological space to explore the scenarios. It’s an effort in disassociation.
Also, the use of humour is an effective way of puncturing the risk of potential distress.
Variety of responses
A lot of what participants are presented with during the session is deliberately absurd and sometimes contradictory. How we responded to that across the groups we were split into varied in an interesting way.
It’s possible to take everything at face value and enter into it in the spirit of “how would I really respond in a situation like this?”. Not everyone did though, some responded by meeting the absurdity head on and coming up with responses that were similar in tone to the scenario; much more playful.
I don’t think either response is right or wrong. It was just interesting to observe the variety of responses and how that coloured the discussion.
It’s exploring a controversial idea
“Banford” has a point to make. It’s set out early on in the preamble that the whole exercise is a response to “permacrisis” in Higher Education. It asks people to explore the reality on professionals and students of moving from one existential real world crisis to another taking its cues from the most recent financial crisis and austerity, COVID and the advent of generative AI in the mainstream.
It’s most controversial contention is that “permacrisis” is, for some, convenient but also a deliberate choice to engineer “productivity”. My reading is that “Banford” tries to explore the ramifications of that on the people delivering the services. It doesn’t pull its punches.
At this conference. the audience was mostly like-minded and made up of people whose roles were the ones “on the receiving end” of this sort of situation.
It made me curious about how the outcomes of the session for us would differ from that of a group of people that included some that they might feel they were the target of criticism.
There’s power in a storyteller’s hands
There’s a saying (of dubious provenance) that “those who tell the stories rule the world”. “Banford” feels like an effort by Peter, Donna and Lawrie to reclaim agency in this situation by constructing this immersive story experience and inviting others to do the same by bringing them into it as participants. Stefanie Reissner (2010) has written about how this feeling of agency at times of change is key in helping people navigate the disruption and emerge positively and I think that’s partly what’s going on here.
There is another element of this power relationship that I’ve been thinking about.
Peter acknowledged during the session that the creators of Banford were “unreliable narrators” and that it was important that they recognise their own unreliability. From a literary point of view, it’s less important that a narrator realises their unreliability than the audience do. It’s something that puts the power back in the hands of the reader/participant in this case.
Peter, Donna and Lawrie are very charismatic facilitators. Despite the explicit acknowledgement of their fallibility in their role, they are still in a position of considerable power. They control the story and the “vibe” of the whole exercise. They bring their own academic, political and social viewpoints to the endeavour. Like the movie says: “with great power, comes great responsibility”!
Exiting is as important as entering
One bit of feedback I gave the Banford team was that I found the “induction” process they had constructed was helpful. The “de-induction” at the end is also something important to create time and space for. As Donna said, a lot of this happens in the post-session conversation. If we think of this as a sort of community theatre experience, lots of work goes into signalling how people enter into an unreal space of play to make sure there is psychological safety. In the theatre, at the end of a performance there’s an established ritual of curtain calls where performers shed their characters and we return to the real world, still ourselves but changed.
I suggested to Lawrie afterwards that they could include some structure around this “de-induction” by asking people to reflect on a few simple questions.
Having had this experience and thinking about your real world situation:
- What for you is different now?
- What has remained the same?
- What will you do now?
That’s not the only way to do it, but it was my first thought.
So where now?
Aside from all the abstract thought’s these 2 examples brought up for me, the important thing is that working in this imaginary story realm opens up loads of possibilities for deepening understanding, inspiring ideas and building relationships. Working in situations that are deliberately “unreal” obviously brings challenges and you may be nervous about trying it.
Ask yourself what ideas your exploring or problems you are helping people to solve and think which would benefit from taking people into these fictional spaces to do something transformational. Perhaps try it by yourself, without any sort of audience and see where your mind takes you…
Reference
Reissner, S. C. (2010). Change, meaning and identity at the workplace. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23(3), 287–299. Retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/09534811011049617 (last accessed 21st April 2013)
Photo by Frank Cone
