Description Long

The aim is for workshop participants to let go of their usual thought patterns and their sense of certainty about the topic. This encourages a more objective and open-minded approach. To achieve this, a highly engaging and deliberately off-topic story is told – one with minimal connection to the original theme or challenge. The story should be long enough to shift participants away from their habitual ways of thinking, but not so long that it leads to distraction or boredom. An ideal length is around three to five minutes. The story ends with a “shock moment” that requires participants to improvise and respond immediately. The transition from listening to spontaneous action should be quick and unexpected, ensuring that participants don’t have time to slip back into familiar thought patterns.

Preparation

• Before the workshop begins, an A4 sheet of paper and a pen are placed at each participant's seat. It is not necessary to hide these materials, but they should not be mentioned in advance in order to preserve the spontaneity of the method.
• Prepare suitable images for the story using PowerPoint slides.

Execution

1. The facilitator tells the story, taking their time so that participants can fully immerse themselves in it and forget the previous workshop activities.
2. A second facilitator displays the prepared PowerPoint slides at the appropriate moments. These visuals help illustrate the story and encourage participants to drift further into it and engage with it emotionally.
3. At the end of the story, a shock moment follows. This might be a question or a task addressed to the participants, which requires immediate action. The question is either read aloud or displayed on the PowerPoint presentation.
4. Participants are asked to respond to the question or task within, for example, 30 seconds (the time limit can be adjusted). Deliberately limiting the time prevents overthinking and encourages spontaneous responses. The question should be simple and open-ended, such as: “Write down three words that come to mind when you think of [topic].”
5. The person who writes down the most words on their sheet wins.

Hints from experience

• It is very important for the rest of the workshop that the words and keywords generated during this activity are used in the following steps – for example, as input for subsequent methods. Participants will come up with a large number of valuable terms, creating a great deal of variety in the early phase. It would be a real shame if these keywords were not taken into account later on.
• If the facilitators notice that participants need more time for the “shock task”, the time limit can be quietly extended without announcing it in advance.

Tools list

• Computer/Laptop
• Paper
• Projector
• Writing utensils, pen, pencil

References

This method was developed during the Crealab Winter School 2022 by Joël Meienberg, Melanie Müller, Silvan Perrig, Arijeta Gojani, Lisa Rüegg, Simon Schärer and Dario Schürch.