When we try to improve or invent a product or process, we often get stuck in negativity: “Oh, no that won’t work!” Part of the problem is that we need to separate out IDEATION from EVALUATION. These are two different mental processes, using our right and left brain hemispheres, and we can’t do them both […]
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My last post looked at a variety of methods for closing a meeting. Now let’s take a look at openings. As meeting participants arrive, they bring with them the remnants of whatever they were doing or thinking about before they walked in the room. Each person needs to make a shift in focus, and how […]
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Research indicates that our memory of an event or transaction tends to be colored by our experience of its ending. If the event was challenging, difficult, or boring, but wrapped up with a satisfying conclusion, we will come away with a more positive memory than if it was good in the beginning but ended poorly. […]
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As a facilitator, I am always pushing my clients to put announcements and reports into a memo and reserve their F2F meeting time for the things that people in groups do best: generate ideas, make decisions, solve problems, plan strategy. So I am always interested in new methods for ideation and problem-solving. Daniel Pink’s blog […]
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I’m preparing to teach a two-day workshop on group facilitation in a few weeks. When I plan a class, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that I would love to impart to my students; I can never cover it all. So I make a practice of distilling it down to about […]
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Tags: Facilitation Tools, Practice
I’ve been working on a piece of homework assigned during a presention by my Australian buddy Donna McGeorge at the 2011 IFVP Conference. One of her recommendations to us was to make a list of fifty declarations: statements that we know, through our professional expertise, to be absolutely true. This list can then be turned […]
My workshop “Meetings That Don’t Suck” offers tips, tools, and tricks for planning and facilitating better meetings. Most folks who take the course are in some kind of leadership position in which they have responsibility for meetings. But what can you do if you are low on the office food chain, and are stuck as […]
A recent blog post by Daniel Pink alerted me to a hilarious Wall Street Journal piece by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. Adams suggests that one of the best ways to generate good new ideas is to generate a bunch of really bad ones. He gives some pretty silly and/or outrageous examples of ways […]
One of the services I offer my clients: naming the elephants in the room.