People tree ++

With this title, you might think you're about to enter another dimension of this activity. I don't claim to achieve that. You have to take the "++" in the computer science sense of the term, i.e. an increment (+1) on your mastery of this activity, which is already quite good.

Origin

It's not easy to find the origins of something so well known and used. We are drowning in resources without being able to trace the thread back. Resources that often quote one another and almost always use the same illustration.

As I suspected this activity wasn't purely French, I started by looking for its English translation, but "peoples tree" didn't give anything very interesting, "compagny tree" came up from time to time but without giving me more leads. In the end, a picture is worth a thousand words, and it was while trying to find the author of the image below that I stumbled upon the website of Pip Wilson, which allowed me to put some order into all this.

I note that this person is VERY active on his blog. Opened in 2003 and until 2022 there are 16,655 posts!!! That's an average of almost 833 per year! Or about 2.3 per day! Well, in 2022 he posted "only" 228 posts and nothing in 2023 so far. Admittedly, his posts are often just a line or a picture, but it's still impressive longevity and activity.

So, Pip Wilson is a British psychologist and author of very many books in this field. He began his career in the "Yong Offenders Unit" (prison unit for young offenders) and then moved on to the YMCA. Unsurprisingly, all his pedagogy was made for children and young people in difficulty. Which led him to create "blobs", little humanoid characters, asexual, agendered, acultural, ... in short, as socially neutral as possible so that everyone can easily identify with them. On the other hand, they are quite expressive bodily and emotionally, and they are put into situations in various and varied places. Pip Wilson's idea is that children don't know how to express their feelings, or express them poorly. So it's much easier to project them onto these "blobs" and to talk about them as a third person. As it turns out, even for adults, it makes things a lot easier.
He has nevertheless made 24 books with his blobs. When I told you the man was prolific.


And the people tree is taken from his pedagogy?

Exactly. It's the one that met with the greatest success. He even made a dedicated website to promote all his teaching material, including the famous people tree that everyone knows. If you want to vary your illustrations, know that he sells 169 situation settings of his little characters. At the beach, mountain, pool, on a bridge, in the city, ...

And when does it date from?

I don't know exactly. There's a blog post dating from November 30, 2004, but I guess it must be much older. And reading the post carefully, we find a reproduction of an article from the "Times Educational Supplement" from January 2006 that quotes Pip Wilson as follows:

"This picture is over 25 years old," says Pip Wilson. "It emerged from my youth work in East London with young people unwilling or unable to read and has circulated since among teachers and other professionals often in the shape of photocopies of photocopies. Now we have greatly extended the range of Blob situations and scenarios - though all offer the same multiplicity of interpretation that made the original so useful a tool."

The article was promoting a new edition of the blob book illustrated by Ian Long. So, we can reasonably think that the original people tree dates from the very early 1980s. Which also confirms a piece of information I saw: one of the first editions of a blob book dates from 1985 (sorry, I no longer have the source). I don't know the man's age, but judging by his photos, that seems entirely credible to me.

The workshop

Let's look at the workshop itself now. I'm not going to explain it to you, but rather point out things to watch out for following what I've seen or experienced.

Some sources will answer for you depending on what you chose; it looks so much like armchair psychology that you wouldn't expect to find that in a workshop. But reality often exceeds fiction.
A person with a well-hung tongue will want to interpret the characters of their team before those people can even express themselves. Don't let them do it under any circumstances, point out to them that their intervention is out of place and above all restate the question clearly so that the right person resumes their explanation from the beginning.

Uniqueness of characters. It's possible that people take a character by default instead of the one that really resembles them, all because another person had already taken it. So, don't forget to say that the characters are multi-assignable, even if the interpretations can be different.

Lack of identification. It's not uncommon for it to be difficult to identify with a character, but not including yourself in the drawing automatically excludes you from the group. To alleviate this problem, you can keep other characters in reserve to choose from and place independently. But I'll explain all that in the variations paragraph.

Variations

Initially, for this post, I wanted to content myself with listing several variations of the people tree that I used. The original is fine, but a bit of variety doesn't hurt. But I pulled on the thread and produced the post you've just read. Otherwise, a few very useful resources to vary this exercise.

If you wish to support Pip Wilson's work you can buy the illustrations on his website directly.

There are free illustrations on his site if you look hard enough though. Like the football one : 

Then, a few resources I've collected over my wanderings.

FlexJob	Mathilde Riou	Atelier collaboratif
	

Others I haven't used, like those from BeeKast. At educagri they call it the «Ostend tree»

Finally, one of the best variations I've found is the one offered by Aurelien Morvant on his site Ashitabzh. There, no pre-positioned character, it's up to you to choose which one and where to place it! And I find this idea excellent! Instead of taking a default character that may not quite match your mood, here you're the one who selects and places it. Thanks to the Coach Agile site for making it easily available to us.

PS: Obviously, I remain open to adding or removing a resource upon simple request.

Update of 07/10/2024: I've just learned of Pip's passing 💀😢☠️. Even though I have no connection with him, I still have a thought for his family. He leaves us at the venerable age of 84 years 4 months and 20 days ... rest in peace.