facilitation skills
Facilitating Resilience and Conflict – Conference Highlights
Last week we had over 150 people in San Diego, CA attending the IAF Conference of the Americas for the first time in 5 years! Every workshop I attended was provocative, insightful, and timely in terms of what the world needs now to change rapidly and strategically. There were speakers and participants from 22 different…
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…
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…
The Facilitator: Sage on the Stage or Guide on the Side?
In one of our recent public courses to teach facilitation skills, someone used the phrase “sage on the stage or guide on the side”. I think they were having an aha moment about the job of the process facilitator. It is not to be a lecturer or the wise knowledgeable expert, but a person who…
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 Sustainable Facilitator: Ensuring Planet-Friendly Work and Life
This may seem like an odd topic and you may be tempted to dismiss it. But I assure you it will have some great tips no matter where you are in your facilitation practice and your relationship with the planet and its care. For over a year we’ve been posting a sustainability and wellness tip…
Oops…When the Facilitator Does Not Get the Product the Group Needs
Everyone has bad facilitator days when the group did not get the outcomes or specific product they needed. No worries. It happens to me all the time. Well, more rarely these days but a lot in the early days…So what are you to do about it? My mentor, Bill Staples of ICA Associates, Canada helped me…
Why Facilitators Need to Talk About Race
This month I’m continuing on the topic of race (a social construct which has complex origins and often, harmful consequences) and facilitation. In full disclosure, I am not a full-time facilitator of racial dialogues. I have had many occasions to hold these conversations in groups because it comes up in strategic planning, or team-building/conflict interventions….
When the Facilitator Must NOT Be Neutral
It’s been a month since we last wrote our blog. The tree embedded in the banner represents some big things the human race is finally speaking about on a global basis – race inequity and other forms of oppression. In many parts of the world there have been demonstrations about race, specifically triggered by deadly…
