AMIS, With Thomas Arctaedius
Working with us
How does a group come up with something none of its members could have thought of alone? We work in the phase most development processes skip: while things are still vague and there is time for perception to shift. Below are four examples of how that work can look. Most collaborations start with a conversation and end up somewhere between them.
Start with a conversation
Tell us what you are working on and what feels stuck or unclear. We will suggest a format, and you will change it. A talk can grow into a workshop, a workshop into a longer collaboration, and sometimes the most useful thing is a single afternoon.
The methods come from improvisation and other artistic practices of creating together. They were developed in the AMIS research project at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH), in two years of work with teams from Scania, PostNord and Implement Consulting Group.
Four examples
A talk
meet the thinking
An introduction for larger groups at a conference, kick-off or network meeting. We tell what happened in the research and in the rooms we worked in, and let the audience try the way of working for a few minutes rather than only hear about it.
A workshop
do it yourselves
Your team works hands-on with cards, scores and exercises around a question that is yours, in a format that allows the question to change along the way. It is not team building. We usually design material for your group and theme.
Facilitator training
grow the skill
A small group in your organisation learns to design and lead this kind of process. You get concepts, exercises and formats to develop further in your own setting, not a method to follow. In the project’s final lab, partner teams composed their own sessions from the material and ran them at home.
A longer collaboration
build the conditions
We follow a development effort over time, as co-designers, and work with you on what makes the way of working hold up in everyday work: protected time, a pace you can influence, and attention to what taking part costs different people.
What we ask you to protect
We do not promise breakthroughs, transformation or trust on demand. Those cannot be produced, only invited. What we can do is design the conditions, and what lasts is not a method but conditions the organisation itself protects:
- Time that does not have to be justified in advance
- Permission not to know
- Someone who keeps the room open: a person, not a tool
The open-ended phase can feel freeing to one person and draining to another, and the time, energy and security it takes to join in are not evenly shared. That is why we start with the conditions.
Who we are
Klas Nevrin and Thomas Arctaedius are the researchers and practitioners behind AMIS. Between us we cover facilitation, lecturing and the design of material and tools, and we have worked with teams in industry, consulting and the public sector. This work continues independently of KMH.
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