Creativity

Deepening Your Facilitation with Metaphors

As many of you know, I love to use metaphors in my facilitation events, workshops and social media.  Recently, I was invited as a guest facilitator to present a workshop with Jorie Wu and Jackie Chang with the CP Yen Foundation, Taiwan on the power of metaphors in facilitation. They summarized nicely the key points…

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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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Light Up Your Group’s Thinking Power

Let’s focus today on online versions of three of my absolute favorite tried and true creative thinking frameworks/techniques.  I have used these for the most complex problem solving sessions that require people to fire up their brains in different ways. We describe the what, when and how of each: Six Thinking Hats, Reverse Problem Solving…

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From simple to sophisticated… virtual facilitation tools and tips you must try!

Contributors: Dr. Manal Alnaimi, Saudi Arabia Mireille Beumer, Netherlands Grace Tan, Singapore Today’s blog is going to have a lot of links. My purpose is to inspire you to get outside of your comfort zone and try new things. If you are “stuck” in this in-between world of in-person and virtual, perhaps you need some…

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Uncovering Opportunities – A Facilitator’s Early Response to a Global Shutdown

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, some of us are finding lots of opportunities to offer our skills and services as process facilitators.  And others are not. I want to acknowledge that both are true right now.  And neither is better than the other. It just is. Nonetheless, I also want to emphasize that there are…

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Increasing the Meta Impact of Your Energizers

At the IAF Asia conference last week, Grace Tan from Singapore and I co-facilitated a session on meaningful energizers. We were trying to urge facilitators to choose their energizers and ice breakers wisely, not just because it was a favorite thing to do. We recommend you do not use energizers as a “filler” or simply…

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Treat Your Groups to 6 Energizers From Our Menu

Here are a few really cool meeting energizers from colleagues whom I deeply respect or whose processes I have used and found to work extremely well. Please read also our earlier blog on why I normally disapprove of energizers just to energize or have fun!  These energizers are relevant, fun and produce an outcome. The…

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No Tent Poles, Too Many Flies, Low on TP and Facilitator Adaptability

Remember I told you I was going on a canoe trip this summer? It was my first adaptability test of the summer.  My second one was experiencing two super typhoons in Japan and Hong Kong in September. I’ll tell you about that experience in another blog. The canoe trip reminded me what we take for granted as…

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Energizer: Positively Connecting the Group

True to my word, we are keeping the blog very short and sweet for the next little while. Here is a quick energizer I’ve used in various formats for many years. I learned and adapted it from my Portland colleague Paula Manley! It is also based on the “flow” concept of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It works…

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Brainstorming Gone Wrong? Here’s How to Fix It

We suspect you have seen poor brainstorming technique by people NOT trained as facilitators. Typically here is how brainstorming goes: The meeting person says: “We have problem x. What can we do to solve it?” The leader writes down as many ideas as they can get from whomever has an answer on a flipchart or…

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