Featured Resource: Hyper Island Toolbox
By Dr. Jonathan A. Caballero, Strategic Operations Advisor
3-min read
Considering the functions that implementation support practitioners serve, it is no surprise that our day-to-day activities are highly social.
Concretely, performing these critical functions — Connect, Understand, Inspire, Enable, and Transform — often involves planning, facilitating, and conducting interactive activities along with our teams.
One way to facilitate the process of thinking and planning which team activities can best fit our goals is having access to curated lists of activities, ideally with guidance on how to conduct them and resources to streamline the process.
The Hyper Island Toolbox is a great place to start!
About the toolbox
The Hyper Island toolbox is an ever-growing curated collection of practical methods and activities that you can apply to your own work. For years, we have been using Liberating Structures and someone recently asked if we had heard of Hyper Island, since it has similar kinds of resources. We had not, and were super excited to see everything it has to offer.
In the toolbox, you will find a variety of options to foster creative collaboration with your team. You can use them for a variety of goals and in different contexts (including virtual, in-person, and hybrid situations) throughout your implementation support activities.
Hyper Island’s approach to these methods and activities encourages users to approach them with openness for experiential learning and reflection – i.e. being prepared for experimentation, learning-by-doing, and building on your own experience while conducting them to continually improve. The methods and activities can be used individually or in combination with others depending on your goals.
In fact, as the proposed activities are so flexible and can fit so well with the functions of implementation support practitioners, we have included some of them as recommendations in some of the modules of our new course “The Hidden Curriculum: Igniting Change From the Middle”, opening in September 2024.
Using the toolbox
As of the date of writing this post, the toolbox includes 117 methods and activities. To make it easier for you to identify and choose an appropriate one for your goals, it allows filtering methods and activities in terms of categories (such as well-being, innovation, and creativity), the time that facilitating them can take, and the group size in which you expect to use them.
Each entry provides a step-by-step guide to plan and facilitate the activity and offers additional resources, such as interactive templates, videos, and printable materials. All of this can be very helpful when deciding which activity to use, and when conducting it.
Here are some examples:
IDOARRT Meeting Design – It can help you when you are planning a meeting to collaborate with your team and want their objectives to be crystal clear and the environment to be psychologically safe.
Stinky Fish – Can be used when you want to explore people’s concerns, fears, or anxieties, in a playful, but effective way, providing a starting point for reassuring conversations and for planning how these concerns could be addressed or prevented.
Critical Thinking Mindset – Supports teams to reflect by using critical thinking questions to discover and discuss new information. As you can easily apply it to your implementation initiative, we have included it as a recommended activity to support the Understand function in our newest course!
We invite you to explore the toolbox, discover interesting activities and methods to use along with your team settings, and leverage them to support your work as a changemaker!
This article was featured in our monthly Implementation in Action bulletin! Want to receive our next issue? Subscribe here.