Stage 4: Adventurer
How to Facilitate a Community River Clean-up (when you are not a facilitator)
In our 2023 year end blog, we look at how a leader without facilitation training can help a community do an important sustainability project. I admit it would be easier and likely more efficient, if you can get a facilitator to help you do this. But imagine, you are a leader who uses your skills…
How Do You Decide to Take That Facilitation Job?
Quite a few years ago, I presented a paper at a conference called “When to Take the Job”. I was trying to be more discerning about which client work to take on. This is true more than ever now. I have been passing on almost all the jobs that I have been asked to do…
Are you respecting your sacred facilitation tools?
I’ve had several conversations with colleagues about how and when to share various facilitation frameworks, techniques and tools. I was deeply moved also by the care and respect that I witnessed recently from an indigenous group of their own tools. For example, they were very intentional about ensuring they were emotionally and mentally aligned with…
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…
Can you stand the silence? Why it happens in meetings and what to do
A participant in a recent course asked us this question, “How do you handle ‘dead air’ in meetings?” My immediate inner response was, what is ‘dead air’ in meetings? I imagined the person meant that there was not as much participation or engagement by the meeting participants as they had hoped for. The silence felt…
Using ORID to Make a Positive Difference During COVID
Sometimes you want to have complex conversations with people you don’t know. Facilitators become masters at this. We help groups have engaging and fascinating discussions even when they don’t know each other and are talking about something that’s controversial. So, we wanted to show you this using the Focused Conversation Method. We talked with a…
The Surprising and Creative Response to COVID-19
For weeks, I’ve been isolating myself at least in a physical way. And yet I feel potentially more connected to the world, colleagues, friends and family more than ever before because of our collective care and concern for this global shut down. I’ve hesitated to offer anything because I see my colleagues offering so much. …
Facilitator Math – When You Need to Use Numbers to Get Better Results
Most facilitators are not really into math, but you may need to be. I keep discovering how important it is to watch numbers and patterns (the underlying structure of math) when you are conducting a facilitated session. Here are two quick tips to get really good results. One is something all facilitators seem to get…
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…
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…
