Facilitator Competencies
How to Overcome Your Fear of Co-Facilitation
Just back from Osaka, Japan (Typhoon occurred just before I arrived shutting the Osaka airport down for a week+ and knocking out electricity at our Bed and Breakfast for a day!) and Hong Kong (Super Typhoon while I was there delaying my flight home by a day). I share this because I was jointly facilitating 6…
Facilitation Can Change the World – An Interview with Barbara MacKay
Joshua Voon, of our International Facilitation Cohort (2018-2019) interviewed me in July 2018 with what he calls meta questions. I thought his questions were wonderful and would perhaps be of interest to those who have or are starting a facilitation practice. Here are his questions and my answers. Q: What got you interested in facilitation?…
Making Your Job Easier as Facilitator – The Art of Preparation
Today, we’re going to talk about how our team usually prepares for a facilitation event. It is a little bit like preparing a picnic! You want to get all of your dishes figured out ahead of time, know which dishes go together and decide how you are going to arrange them in the agenda. We’re…
Short But Powerfully Participatory Meetings
The Diagnosis You have 20 to 30 minutes to hold your regular team meeting. You’ve fallen into the bad practice of just having people report out. It has become an informational meeting where there’s not very much interaction. Some people may be paying attention for part of it but probably not all of it! You…
What Can A Facilitator Do to Honour Life’s Milestones?
Since 1995, when I first learned the Technology of Participation methods from The Institute of Cultural Affairs, I have been impressed with the tool I have heard them use on staff and collegial special events, good-byes and birthdays. However, the way I’ve been using it over the decades, is to conduct a conversation with my…
Challenging Participant Behaviors – An 8 Step Survivor’s Guide
Imagine you are presenting at a pre-conference workshop where everyone wants to be there. People have signed up and paid to be there. There was no possibility that someone could show up at the facilitators conference, pay a good amount of money and not want to be there. Right? Not so! This is what happened…
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…
The Facilitator Role: Shifting Harmful Situations to Healthy Ones
This is a story about a woman who changed everything. She took something that seemed impossible, and turned it into the most amazing project that a whole community got behind. (See her project here: www.washedashore.org) The model of this project could be used anywhere in the world. We, as facilitators can be agents to help…
Facilitator Endurance: 4 Stages That Win You the Gold
I’ve been thinking about endurance. The winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea now, are a very big demonstration of endurance. Athletes go through a four stage process more or less of endurance training. What about facilitators? I’d like to talk about the why and what of the four stage process as it relates to our…
Get More Facilitation Clients and In-House Opportunities
Have you had trouble convincing potential clients why they need a facilitator? Three recent events have led me to choose this topic for our blog today. In these events, everyone wanted the same thing. They were starting a facilitation business and wondering how to sell their services to prospective clients. Or, they were in house…
