On day two of the Leapfrog launch week at Imag­i­na­tion­Lan­caster a range of exter­nal par­tic­i­pants were invited to take part in a work­shop to gen­er­ate ideas and solu­tions to develop tools for non-​written con­sul­ta­tion. A range of pub­lic sec­tor offi­cers from across Lan­cashire came to Imag­i­na­tion for the after­noon so we could spend time lis­ten­ing to the chal­lenges they face in their roles and what approaches and tech­niques they have tried before. The Leapfrog team then worked with participants to elicit rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion with the aim of gen­er­ating ideas, poten­tial tools and solu­tions for the future. These were cap­tured using the Hexa­gon tool. Par­tic­i­pants were encour­aged to be as prac­ti­cal or as inno­v­a­tive as they wished to be in their creative thinking.

Small groups then categorised ideas into Pears or Lemons. Pears being an idea the group felt they’d like to take for­ward and Lemons being assigned to the rub­bish pile. Small groups spent time devel­op­ing their ideas in detail and pre­sent­ing these back to the group at the end of the ses­sion. The orig­i­nal intention was for the whole group to vote on their favourite ideas to be devel­oped into tools throughout the rest of the week. However the group con­sen­sus was that there were so many strong inno­v­a­tive ideas, they would all be con­sid­ered in the next part of the short project activ­i­ties. The team will now develop these ideas into tools that are ready to be pre­sented to our pub­lic sec­tors part­ners in per­son on Friday.