Agenda Design

Designing with Audacity – Focus on Big Picture and Finesse the Details

You probably know this already. Designing a facilitated session requires paying attention to both the bigger mission and vision of the session and paying attention to extremely fine details. Designing is, as many of us say, “an art and a science”. In this blog, we’ll talk briefly about some of the tricks that my colleagues…

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The Art of Mixing and Matching Techniques – What to Do and Not Do

In a recent facilitation, my colleague, Rangineh Azimzadeh Tehrani of Solh Resolutions International and I discussed the design of something fairly complex in a short amount of time. It was a job for Mercy Corps and members temporarily called “Women’s Philanthropy Group”. We had several lofty objectives! In this blog, we talk about what makes a…

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Finally – Your Very Own Complete Professional Facilitator Development Library

We did it. We worked for years to make facilitator user-friendly content. Now we hope you will benefit from it in some new ways. This blog shares a bit of a story about my journey (and my collaboration with Eileen) and where I am now. Sorry – not much on technique today.  BUT rich on…

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Meeting the Impossible Strategic Planning Request

In this blog, I meet with two esteemed colleagues, Leah Hopton from Vancouver, Canada, and Teck Kwang Loh from Singapore. We discuss the various ways that we’ve approached strategic planning. I introduce the typical ToP Strategic Planning model and talk about where it’s different from most planning frameworks.   Part 1: Strategic Planning Introduction  …

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Clear Flowing Agendas – Designing Using Meta Methods

What is a meta method? It is a framework that can be used over and over in many different circumstances.  It is the foundation behind all other tools and techniques. It works marvelously in most situations that require clear thinking.  Are you designing with meta methods?  I will talk about two in this blog and…

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Staying Calm When the Group Hates Your Facilitator Process!

Or you, the participant hate the process! Some people profess to not like process. I guarantee that at times in meetings, it might be as high as 75%+ of the group who are not enjoying the process. If you could hear people think out loud it might sound like this, “Why can’t everyone just think…

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Seven Facilitator Tips to Make Your Training MUCH More Engaging

You have your training plan ready and you realize you want it to be more engaging. Typical training is about passing on learning and content, in small or large blocks. It provides theory, information, and ideally activities to help retain the information. But the emphasis is on a hierarchical model where the trainer is the…

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A Simple Design to Facilitate Climate Change Action

This blog is going to focus on a climate change action workshop in Hong Kong I was co-leading in the midst of a super typhoon coming towards Hong Kong.  Hong Kong had never experienced this high level (9) typhoon in its history.  Here is a photo of a tiny sample of the after math in…

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Deepen the Dialogue on School Gun Violence–A Facilitator’s Approach

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about eight ways to process a tragedy using the ToP (Technology of Participation) Focused Conversation method. Each conversation was designed for a specific group in mind. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been processing the US school shootings – one in a high school and one in…

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Spring Clean Your Meetings! The Art of A Fresh Start

This blog contains a series of videos and handouts on how to dramatically enliven your meetings. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring is often the time we take to get rid of old, NOT useful things. It is a time to freshen up our day-to-day living space. We call this process “spring…

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