Hi Karen, the experience, case studies, case histories that you are asking for have been suggested as one of the key reasons for having a community such as this one. You are not alone :-)
However, as you have already gathered, few of the partners communicate their experience openly on the web site. I cannot speak for anyone other than CAPRESE, but I’ll list a few of the reasons why I think that we don’t see that many case studies out there.
1) Confidentiality – People and institutions tend to be reluctant to brag about their problems or difficulties. This would be an initial hurdle to describing the context of an LSP intervention.
2) Contact with participants – At least in my experience, participants arrive at the workshop not knowing the facilitator, perhaps not knowing the workshop organiser and quite likely not knowing that the methodology to be used is LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. After the workshop, the participants catch their trains/planes home and have little further contact with the facilitator.
3) Corporate Politics/Corporate Culture – Some managers are reluctant to allow external facilitators to have access to their staff, after the event.
4) Editorial skills – excellent facilitators are not necessarily excellent writers. I could quite imagine that many of our colleagues would hesitate a while before trying to document a case that their peers could read.
5) Time – I don’t think I need to explain this one. Frequently “Time” and “Motivation” are synonymous
6) Pertinence – One of the great things about the Partner Learning Days that were held in Billund every year, was that partners WOULD share their experiences. And what struck me at this event, was the diversity of activities of the various partners.
So to summarise: my feeling is that while the work I have been doing recently with the United Nations is interesting, I cannot be sure that my client would be confident (confidentiality) about the general public reading about his challenges, happy with me contacting his counterparts from other agencies (contact with participants) or taking up the precious time of his team on feedback sessions (corporate culture). And on my side, I know that it would take a number of days (time) to write adequately (editorial skills) about the event in a way that genuinely captured the challenge and the success, and I am not sure that after all that, it would help anyone else sell LSP to a prospective client (pertinence).
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