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 […]
Tag Archives: Facilitation Tools
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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 […]
>In a recent blog post, Harvard Business Review writer Peter Bregman calls PowerPoint the “#1 Killer of Meetings.” I’m not sure if I agree it’s number one – I’ve been to any number of sucky meetings that didn’t involve PowerPoint – but it is definitely in the top five. I personally am on a one-woman […]
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>Just as visual artists know that white space is a key element in a good design, good facilitators know that break time is a key element in good meeting design. When there is a lot of work to be done or information to be conveyed, it is tempting to schedule every minute, but this will […]
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 […]
> Me, surfing in Costa Rica A few weeks ago I spent several days of my vacation in a learning environment. After my return, I prepared to teach a couple of facilitation workshops. I try to use my learning experiences to inform my teaching My surfing instructors patiently worked with me through all the component […]
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> For years, office workers have chortled over Scott Adams’ cartoon depictions of incompetent bosses, slacking co-workers, and evil HR directors. He’s now been joined in the Twitterverse by Meeting Boy, an anonymous worker who tweets funny observations regarding the useless meetings his boss requires him to attend. Could Meeting Boy’s workplace experience be improved […]
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One of the services I offer my clients: naming the elephants in the room.