Part 2: Participating in Greenpeace’s Critical Incident Network

cross-posted on the WAO blog

After a number of years, we’ve been given the go-ahead to write openly about a project we’ve been working on with Greenpeace International. This is part 2, get caught up with Part 1: Navigating Greenpeace’s Critical Incident Network (CIN).

Build your pathways

Creating a whole educational programme is much more complex than simply putting together a training session. Imagine it as a detailed network of learning, where topics are carefully connected, each one building on what’s been learned before, aiming for a level of expertise. This process combines learning goals, ways of testing understanding, teaching methods, carefully chosen resources, and more.

Your best bet, figure out the big picture. GPI has the goal of increasing Greenpeace’s organisational and communication responsiveness by building confidence, team cohesion and staff capacity in how to identify and deal with critical incidents communication (particularly as a part of a Critical Incident response team).

Dive into your pathways

The network pathway provides us with a lens through which we can create individual training offerings. We aim to help people up their involvement with the CIN through a structured offering:

Step 1 — Observing: First, you want to introduce people to the big idea. We have an introductory session that introduces the CIN and can help people understand what to expect from the network as a whole, and then the first training initiative, the CIN Advanced Comms training. An introductory session gives potential participants a taste and helps them to make an informed decision. If a person is interested in becoming a participant, their application is assessed by others in the network.

Step 2 — Participating: Once people are excited about your programme, it’s time to get them into a training session. The first of these, the CIN Advanced Comms Training, takes place online over the course of a month. Part 3 of this series is on its specific design, as it interestingly mixes scenario-based experiential learning with self study and group-based reflection. It’s beautiful and complex (so it deserves its own post ;) This training is designed around 5 learning objectives:

• Shared understanding — building a shared vocabulary and mental model for critical incidents so that people can apply the appropriate tactics and techniques for crisis communications
• Decision-making — identifying relevant information, making a judgement, and choosing a path forward
• Collaboration under pressure — supporting other individuals and the team to respond effectively in difficult and stressful situations
• Stress resilience — developing self-awareness to understand capacity and desire for dealing with difficult and stressful situations
• Conflict reframing — articulating risks to identify communication opportunities

Step 3 — Contributing: A community learning and development programme should inspire people to contribute to its success. The CIN Advanced Comms training doesn’t work without trainers and experts coordinating scenarios and their teams. Therefore, we offer a Train the Trainer (TtT) programme to help level up those in positions of responsibility. The CIN TtT training takes place online over a period of two sessions. These sessions are held on two consecutive days and the training includes some multimedia self study and reflection exercises. The learning objectives for the TtT are:

• Self-reflection — developing a reflective mindset, promoting inclusive relationships
• Learning theory — applying pedagogically-sound learning models including scenario and experiential learning approaches
• Illustrating Leadership — showing ways in which leadership can take many and varied forms
• Logistics — recognising and explaining the structure of the Advanced Comms training and orienting learners within the training
• Coaching — supporting participants and giving developmental feedback

Also part of the Contributing progression step is the as of yet undeveloped Deep Dive. We intend to create another training that provides a more in-depth view into various topics. This offering is TBD.

Step 4 — Leading: Once people are contributing, you want to distribute leadership to help the programme be inclusive and diverse. The CIN programme offers a special session for people who want to be Lead Trainers in the Advanced Comms training team. It is designed to help guide them, and provide an overview to the Trainer Committee, the facilitator or group of facilitators coordinating the training.

Step 5 — Owning: Last, but not least, you should help people take over responsibility. At the moment we have a lot of community building to do before we can reliably make ourselves redundant. However it is the express wish of the CIN Programme team (WAO and our GPI colleagues) to find ways to empower others.

Zoom back out with a canonical link

People need to broadly understand your educational programme so that they can decide if it is something they want to participate in. Our intricate pathways and scaffolded learning objectives are a lot to digest all at once, so we recommend zooming back out to help potential participants understand the programme offerings. A canonical link is a place where you can explain training sessions, link out to more detailed information and easily promote your programme.

Visualising your work

When you are collaborating with a team to create a multifaceted learning programme, it’s helpful to help people imagine the offerings of that programme in several ways. Visualising your pathways, as well as describing them in documents, helps get your learning design team on the same page.

Openly sharing these kinds of plans helps others provide input, and it helps people understand how the entire learning process is structured. These sorts of maps can provide inspiration for others, and they can help you find flaws in your learning logic.

There’s more to come

In Part 3, we will write more specifically about the innovative Advanced Comms training we’ve helped run a number of times. We have loads to say about this project and are looking forward to being more open about it now that it’s no longer in its infancy.