“In a minute, I’m going to ask you to join me in the virtual swimming pool…” The West of England Academy in action

Health Innovation West of England were delighted to run an all day event in partnership with the University of the West of England’s Health Tech Hub, as part of LEAP’s weeklong festival of Digital Health. In the afternoon, colleagues from the West of England Academy ran a fun, interactive and productive workshop on design-thinking. In this blog, Nathalie Delaney, Senior Programme Manager and facilitator, explains how to run the virtual swimming pool workshop. 

At our workshop during LEAP’s recent Festival of Digital Health, we got the conversation started by asking participants to join us in a virtual swimming pool. This is a great activity to use with larger groups to get everyone talking and connecting, and for facilitators it helps understand the wealth of experience and expertise in the room.

When I’ve run this before, I’ve asked people to use the power of their imagination, and this time my co-facilitator Becca had the brilliant idea of using chalk to mark out the areas.

The different areas to mark up (or ask people to imagine) are your swimming pool (with a deep end and a shallow end), a diving board, and a kiddie pool. Then you add a changing room and some sun loungers. This sketch shows the key areas, but you may also want to visualise based on a location you are familiar with (e.g. the Bristol Lido).

First, the facilitator describes the physical layout for people, maybe walking around the space as you do.

“Here is our virtual swimming pool. In a minute, I’m going to ask you to stand in the area that best fits how you are feeling about the topic of the workshop” in this case it was about design thinking.

“Is it really new to you, or you’ve never heard of it before, or you’re not sure about things? That’s absolutely fine, please stand in the changing room area.

Maybe you have dipped your toe in the water, but you aren’t fully confident yet, choose the shallow end or the kiddie pool, whichever feels most appropriate for you!

You might be happily swimming in the pool, possibly you are feeling ready to dive in or a bit in the deep end? Finally, we have our sun loungers, for people who have lots of experience and are sitting back and relaxing!

Stand where you feel you are today, and then once you have found your location, have a chat with the people around you.”

This gets people moving and chatting quickly, and on the feedback forms attendees enjoyed and wanted to spend more time in the swimming pool!

Before heading back into the main session, we asked for feedback from each area on what things came out of their conversations, and any other reflections on the process. We then closed by thanking participants for joining us in the virtual swimming pool and moved into the main part of the workshop delivery.

Give the swimming pool exercise a go in your next event! This event was facilitated by the West of England Academy, which offers a range of free resources to help you gain knowledge and develop essential skills for innovative thinking and working. We promote the use of quality improvement methodologies to support delivery of better patient care. The Academy is for all health and care professionals, front line, support services and commissioners, plus innovators living, working or planning to work in the West of England. We run free learning events as well as bespoke support for those needing specialist advice on our services.