Facilitator Development
Decision Making Authority: When You Have It and When You Don’t
If you search on the phrase “ladder of decision making” on the internet, you find some great graphics. The graphic overview handout we provide you today (free download link is below) is only one version. You can find ones that apply to schools, citizen involvement, leaders in a corporate setting and so on. Our version…
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…
Facilitating When Senior Leaders Are in the Meeting
We’ve all been in meetings where our direct boss is attending or there are very senior leaders in the room. That’s a real facilitator dilemma. You the facilitator should have full control of the group, but you may not feel you can do this with senior leaders in the room. This is a common question…
Finding the Silver Lining… for that Facilitated Event Gone Wrong!
What do you do when you have a facilitated an event that has gone badly? It might just be one moment in the whole event that you keep dwelling on after the fact. You realize you made a mistake. And you don’t exactly know what you could’ve done differently. This blog is about many stories…
Becoming a ToP Facilitation Trainer and Other Questions About ToP Methods
Recently we ran a Technology of Participation (ToP) training for a school district. It was really wonderful to work with principals, consultants and department staff together on an issue of importance to them. We were asked a few questions about Technology of Participation training. This blog answers a few general questions they asked plus tells…
Finding Your Passion – Two Intuitive Tools to Launch Your 2019 Plan
This blog will focus on two intuitive tools to assist you in thinking about your big picture planning for 2019. These are great tools to use with yourself, coaching others, and facilitating any groups who would benefit from having a clear vision and purpose. The first is a brand new one that our son, Gabriel,…
Facilitation Methods vs. Tools: Making Your Facilitator Journey Easier
Today, at risk of repeating ourselves, we are going to talk a bit more about your journey as a facilitator. It is an amazing journey, a “hero’s journey” (mythologist and author Joseph Campbell came up with this term) of sorts. Each one of us will have a different journey, depending especially if we start it…
Facilitation Blogging Made Easy – A Call to Action
In our short video today, we talk about how to make blogging really easy. Obviously, if you are not a facilitator this will still be of interest if you’ve been thinking about blogging. However, I am really excited about having more facilitators blog. Here’s why… More people need to know how facilitation can be used…
How Facilitators Stop Power Imbalance, Dominance and Oppression
This week marked the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, November 11, 1918. WOW. I was in Canada for the last 2 weeks and we passed through a small village on Vancouver Island on this anniversary date. We passed by a beautiful gathering of veterans and citizens in a cemetery. People were…
How to ‘Hang’ with the Client…and Still Get the Job!
Are you in your stride, i.e. relaxed, friendly, laughing, having fun, with every new or prospective client? Are you able to “hang” with any potential client? “Hang” is a slang expression in English that means you are in a very informal, relaxed setting, and you are just enjoying the people you are with, typically friends.…
