Take a 'Walk on the Guile Side'

‘A Walk on the Guile Side’ comes from the Foyer Federation’s latest adventure in advantaged thinking.  At the organisation’s regular team times, members of staff facilitate new exercises to explore different ideas from Open Talent. This week, I shared the facilitation spot with a colleague who has a passion for walking in the local area at lunch times, and so we decided to experiment with an enterprise called Advantaged Thinking Tours.

The concept has three elements:

1)      People on the tour become their own guides.  Participants work together to locate and reflect on a few symbolic local landmarks chosen by Advantaged Thinking Tours for their journey, but are encouraged to use the powers of Advantaged Thinking to ‘spot’ other interesting places, people opportunities, deal and campaign examples in the surrounding environment to make up their own map.

2)      People on the tour act in the spirit of ‘intrepid explorers’ to embrace the idea of finding their own path, challenging themselves to search out new territory, and bringing back fresh perspectives to share and discuss some of the things they experience and learn on the journey.

3)      The tour helps people to realise that, by applying advantaged thinking and an open talent lens, you always see new ‘talents’ of relevance in the world around you – things that you might be walking past each day.

And so the Foyer Federation staff spit into 3 teams to spend 30 minutes starting out from Farringdon to find selected landmarks celebrating the lives of other intrepid spirits, thinkers and reformers, including John Groom, Joseph Grimaldi, Marx, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, William Richard Lethaby, Charles Dickens, Sydney Smith, Dorothy L Sayers, and Benjamin Disraeli.  A remarkable list chosen by my colleague by searching out commemorative plaques, made all the richer by the various random finds of teams as they plotted out their own intrepid routes.   By the end of the exercise, there was a strong rational for the Foyer Federation and Open Talent to be in the Farringdon area.

Advantaged Thinking Tours is a perfect exercise to experience Advantaged Thinking and Open Talent by illustrating some of its ideas through one's own locale, and to open up fresh possibilities in the environment around you in a fun and active way. For other ‘Walk on the Guile Side’ ideas, it is worth checking out the excellent work of Unseen Tours – using the talents of people who have experienced homelessness as guides for a different perspective of the London environment.

Don’t forget:

‘And the Advantaged Thinkers go
Do, do do, do do do, do do do…’