069 - Unflattening: An Attitude that will Expand Our Thinking with Nick Sousanis

workshops work is a podcast for facilitators, by a facilitator, about facilitation… so why have I invited Assistant Professor of Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University and comic book artist Nick Sousanis to join me in this episode?

I read Nick’s remarkable work ‘Unflattening’ recently and immediately knew that the world of facilitation needed to know about it. I was delighted when he accepted my invitation!

What followed was a beautiful exchange of ideas and reflections from two distant fields, worlds that do not normally collide but have more in common than you might first think. 

This is a very special episode of workshops work – and one that I think could change our practice in a deep and powerful way.

 Listen to find out: 

• Why trying to think outside of the boxes we are in isn’t necessarily a good idea
• The most important question Nick believes we need to answer in this moment in time
• Why unflattening is a journey, not a destination
• Why images aren’t simply aesthetic, but communicative in novel and detailed ways
• How creative constraints and limits help us learn, grow, and unflatten

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Questions and Answers

[01:44] Is it correct that Unflattening was your dissertation?

[02:33] What prompted you to draw your dissertation?

[05:25] Where was the idea of Unflattening born?

[08:58] How does Unflattening relate to ‘thinking outside the box’?

[12:47] Did you create Unflattening to intentionally remove as many of these ‘boxes’ as possible?

[17:47] What is the magic ingredient for hearing each other’s arguments?

[22:27] Is Unflattening a journey, a philosophy, a destination?

[27:51] How can we practice Unflattening when it comes to emotive topics?

[31:50] What can pictures teach us that words cannot?

[36:21] How do you encourage people to follow the path of your writing without being too explicitly directional?

[45:05] – What makes a workshop – or a class – fail?

[01:02:13] – What is the one thing you would like listeners to take away from this episode?

Links

• Nick’s website
• An excerpt of Nick’s book, Unflattening

Connect to Nick

• On Twitter
• On Facebook

Any thoughts? Share them with us!

Support the show

👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/  👈