Suzanne McClure
DDRC workshops were conducted in England, Scotland, and Wales for a range of diverse sectors. The workshops consist of a 1-minute challenge for all participants and a 45-minute team model building activity. Various means were utilised for recruiting organisations to participate in the DDRC workshops such as social media and professional contacts. Recruitment materials included a short video with workshop testimonials; an invitation letter from Principal Research, Professor Simeon Yates; and an infographic explaining the workshop format which located at the end of this post.
Below is a brief overview of the workshop format and materials, Lego modelling challenges, statistical confirmation that the workshop objectives were accomplished, and a sample finding. Facilitating the DDRC workshops has provided unique insights such as the 1-minute Lego challenge was essential for illustrating the LSP® methodology to participants and that teams of two to three people produce longer discussions (i.e. research data) than larger groups.
Workshop Format and materials
The DDRC workshops are 90 minutes and follow the format below:
| Minutes | Activity |
| 5 | Collection of consent forms and introduction to LSP® methodology |
| 10 | 1-minute Lego challenge and brief model sharing for individual participants |
| 45 | Group challenge and building of model |
| 30 | Group sharing of their model (recorded using Otter.ai) |
Besides ensuring the workshop format is followed, the key role of facilitators is to encourage discussions amongst participants and across teams, as the research dataset is the recording of the model sharing activity. Facilitator prompt questions during the discussion include items such as Can you provide an example of that instance and Could you elaborate on what you mean by X.
The 1-minute challenge materials include a small bag with five Lego pieces and a larger bag of random pieces. Participants are instructed to use all the pieces in the small bag and as many as needed from the larger bag. For the 45-minute group challenge, each team is provided with a large box of Lego bricks and a smaller container with body part bricks and pieces deemed metaphorical such as flames; characters such as fish, crabs, and ducks; ladders; and connectors. Images of the group challenge materials are below.
Workshop Challenges
The individual and group Lego model challenges are listed on 4 x 6” laminated cards. There are 9 individual 1-minute challenges, and these have also been utilised as a draw to the DDRC booth at the AI UK and AI Fest conferences. The 1-minute challenges are listed below along with images from various conferences and workshops.
1-minute Lego Challenges
- Build a model of your Monday morning.
- Build a model of what brings happiness to your day.
- Build a model of your favourite sound.
- Build a model of something that surprised you today.
- Build a model of the weirdest thing you have ever eaten.
- Build a model of a useless invention.
- Build a model of one of your most embarrassing moments.
- Build a model of perfect day for you.
- Build a model of your ideal superpower.
Eight workshop challenges were designed to illicit attitudes towards data for the group activity and they are:
| Group Lego Challenges |
| Working as a team, build a mode of data privacy concerns in your organisation. |
| As a team, build what comes to mind when thinking about the value of data in achieving organisational success. |
| As a team, build what comes to mind for improving digital technology management in your organisation(s). |
| Working together, build what comes to mind for raising awareness of data risks in your organisation(s). |
| As a team, build a model of how opportunities in data management can be pursued. |
| Working together, build what comes to mind when you think of a data-driven organisational culture. |
| Working together, build a model of possible barriers to accessing data needed for organisational success. |
| Working together, build a model that expresses concern for the confidentiality and the integrity of organisational data. |
Also listed on the laminated group challenge card are the following prompts to aid in the team discussion and model design:
- Thinking about your day-to-day work activities that involve data, what is convenient and inconvenient?
- Can you visualise a time at work when you had difficulty accessing critical data you needed for your job?
- Has there been a time when your data has been compromised at work?
- Have you experienced concerns been about who has access to your organisational data?
Additionally, each group is given a laminated card as a colour-coding guide for building their models and an image is below along with actual workshop models:
As the group challenges were not relevant to workshops conducted for diverse Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) and pensioners, two additional challenges were created: Build a model of the information life cycle of personal data in your business, assessing risks to individual privacy and measures that might mitigate these issues and Build a model of the information life cycle of personal data in your business and identify unforeseen or unintended uses of data.
Confirmation of workshop objectives
The main objective of the DDRC workshops was to investigate issues pertaining to participants’ attitudes towards data. To confirm discussions centred around relevant topics, Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) was employed to identify language choices that differ from typical spoken British English by comparing the workshop datasets to the British National Corpus (BNC) of Spoken English (2014). The BNC Spoken English corpus contains transcribed recordings made by British English speakers residing in the United Kingdom and is largely comprised of spontaneous spoken English. The analysis provides lexical evidence of language that is unique and statistically significant in the workshop discussions as compared to everyday spoken English.
The 25 highest ranking marked content words in the DDRC workshop transcripts compared to the BNC Spoken English corpus are: trustworthy, data, accessible, firewall, secure, organisation(al), confidentiality, phishing, classification, breach, VPN, GDPR, access, governance, silo, Sharepoint, dataset, stakeholder, priority, untrustworthy, CRM (customer relationship management), privacy, external, integrity and vulnerability.
The top 25 Multiword Expressions (MWE) in the DDRC workshop transcripts are: low priority, secure datum, priority datum, privacy concern, organisational success, type of data, accessing datum, data warehouse, personal datum, lot of data, trustworthy datum, good datum, data risk, data breach, red flag, organisational datum, digital technology, bad datum, open source, critical datum, low priority datum, data privacy, technology management, digital technology management, and different type of data.
These results show with a 99.99% confidence level that the language used in the DDRC workshops differs significantly from everyday spoken British English by including words and MWEs that pertain to data, technology, and security.
Example Research Finding
Eight DDRC workshops were facilitated at three different Government sites. Workshops were held in Merseyside and Exeter for SMEs and one in North Wales for pensioners (OAP). Below is a graph illustrating the differing attitudes towards data for the Government workshop participants in comparison to those attending the SME/OAP workshops.
As would be expected, individuals in the SME/OAP group are significantly more concerned about privacy of data and data being secure. The attitudes towards data for Government participants are clearly more focused on key areas such as ownership of data, data integrity, and the ability to access necessary data.
Recruitment infographic
Disclaimer
Our work is in no way affiliated with nor funded by the LEGO® Group. LEGO® Serious Play® is open source and available under the Creative Commons licence ‘Attribution Share Alike’. Further information.
As part of the DDRC’s successful Research Community Hub initiative, we are excited to invite you to a comprehensive live-stream discussion, focusing on the vital topic of “Attitudes Surrounding Data.”
This event is dedicated to exploring how individuals, groups, and societies perceive, understand, value, and interact with data from a social science perspective.
Our panel will include esteemed experts from academic, industry, and governmental backgrounds, offering a rich dialogue on the multifaceted relationships people have with data in today’s digital era.
