Holistic Thinking: What It Is, Why It’s Important, And How To Do It
February 10, 2022
TL;DR
- WeFuture Global’s objective is to inform, educate, and inspire workshop attendees.
- The “Challenge Your World” workshop held in Amsterdam and throughout the Netherlands focuses on a younger audience, between the ages of 17 and 35 years old.
- We sent a user-experience questionnaire to previous workshop attendees and got full consent to share their feedback in this case study.
- From substantial value acquired to practical lessons learnt, positive feedback on workshop facilitation to individual facilitator highlights, WeFuture Global can confidently claim that we have met our objective for the “Challenge Your World” Workshop.
“To raise a future of impact-makers, we start with empowering the individual.”
The following case study serves as an investigation on the impact that the WeFuture Global workshops - specifically the “Challenge Your World” Workshop held in Amsterdam - bring to the students and trainees who attend these events.
This article will explore the primary objective of these workshops, why we focus on young students as the target audience for these events, as well as share some feedback from attendees that had first-hand experience taking part in this WeFuture Global workshop.
WeFuture Global’s Challenge Your World Workshop Objective
The objective of the Challenge Your World Workshop is to inform, educate, and inspire attendees on the topic of world conservation.
We inform students and trainees on the current state of global conservation topics by bringing their awareness to environmental problems and issues happening around the world today, such as the palm oil crisis or the impact of overfishing.
We then educate the attendees by helping them break down these complex problems into smaller, more manageable parts. This helps our attendees better comprehend the complexity of the issues and how they impact other areas of global conservation. To effectively do this, we activate and apply skills such as:
- Analytical thinking
- Critical thinking
- Holistic thinking
- Active learning
The final step of the workshop is where we inspire the attendees by helping them unpack and discover how they can become more sustainable and environmentally friendly in their own lives. In doing so, we help inspire attendees to get excited and feel empowered to make a difference. We do this through teamwork and collaboration, where student teams present their findings to the rest of the workshop to reflect on. We apply skills to this inspire-phase like:
- Problem-solving
- Ideation
- Design thinking
- Innovation
- Sustainable thinking
- Teamwork
- Presentation skills
Challenge Your World Workshop Audience Investigation
For this particular workshop, we choose to focus on trainees in a younger age group, between 17 and 30 years old. We chose this specific group as our research and experience have shown that these trainees are curious to learn about world conservation and the issues we face as a global community. We also have found that attendees in this age group are highly motivated to learn how to make an impact and follow through with these intentions with tangible and progressive action.
Whatsmore, our audience in this age group all have unique and innovative perspectives that may be the key to unlocking sustainable innovation, benefitting generations to come.
With regards to the students who are in university or have just graduated, we have also found that they crave purpose and are in the process of constructing their identity based on the things they find important to them.
We focus on informing, educating, and inspiring these people so we may nurture world conservationists that want to live a more sustainable life and protect our future.
Trainee User Experience Feedback From the Workshop in Amsterdam
We have sent our Challenge Your World Workshop attendees a user-experience questionnaire and have gotten full consent to share their thoughts and feelings on their experience. Here are a few excerpts of what they had to share:
Value Acquired and Lessons Learnt
To measure whether we have met our objective, we asked our workshop attendees what they learnt from their experience and what topics made an impact on them as individuals.
“The piece on palm oil showed very well that there are many products around us in which palm oil is consumed. Partly because of these workshops, I am more critical when looking at what I buy in the supermarket.”
- Bram, age 25
“I learned to look at problems in different ways and to think out of the box. In addition, during the workshop, we were also working on non-standard subjects which made me think about them. During my own presentations, I now pay more attention to my nonverbal communication and make sure my presentations are more interactive. Incidentally, I have become less afraid to actually voice my ideas and opinions so I now often have more of a stake in a conversation. I also learned that your attitude towards others is essential. Because they were enthusiastic, I became enthusiastic too.”
- Celesta, 17
“The workshop made me aware that every small action can have big consequences. That details matter and the power lies both with the individual and with a larger whole. Worth mentioning is what I learned about looking at problem-solving differently. Not to apply a band-aid in the short term, but to find a good solution for the long term. I have been able to apply the values of thinking long term and looking at solving a problem to many other things since attending the workshop.”
- Olivier, 19
Workshop Facilitation
Workshop attendees have described the facilitation of the Challenge Your World Workshop in the following ways:
“WeFuture doesn't just present you with the problems in the world, they make you part of the solution. They involve you in the process and make you aware of how you yourself can make the world a little better.“
- Olivier, 19
“It was mainly very eye-opening.”
- Bram, 25
“The workshop was well put together and I also learned a lot from it. There was not one dull moment and that is because there was a lot of interaction. It was a very informative workshop where everyone's opinion was respected.”
- Celesta, 17
Celesta went on to highlight how the individuals from the WeFuture Team made an impact on her:
“The individuals who facilitated the workshops were very enthusiastic and cheerful. They immediately drew attention and told in an impressive way why and how they started with WeFuture. The workshop leaders emphasized very often that there is no wrong idea and that you should not be afraid to speak your mind.”
- Celesta, 17
As displayed by the user-experience feedback from our Challenge your World Workshop attendees, the team at WeFuture Global have full confidence that we have met our objective of informing, educating, and inspiring these young minds to become more conscious of and active in their impact in world conservation.
If you are an academic institution or governing body and would like to find out more about our innovative solutions, or would like to get involved with a Challenge Your World Workshop - please get in touch with us!
Together, we can make a positive impact on our future!
