facilitator skills

Facilitating From the Side – There’s Hope for Bad Meetings

I worry a lot about people who attend meetings. I worry because many tell me how bad they are. I am totally spoiled. I simply don’t attend others’ meetings unless I know they will be well run. Most of the time, I am facilitating them or facilitating from the side without permission. What about those…

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Facilitating When You Are Sick

I haven’t been feeling well for a few days. I can feel a cold coming on. Usually I get pretty worried about getting sick. The worry comes from not being able to perform my so called duties. When I actually think about just the getting sick part, it brings up an amazing feeling of just…

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Facilitator Succinctness

SUCCINCT! I’ve always loved that word. So my question to everyone of us who facilitates meetings and workshops is: Are you succinct enough? In our recent concurrent session at IAF Asia, several people noted that we needed to be clearer in our instructions with the big group. This is an example of where we were…

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Four Steps to Elegant Meeting Design

Recently I have been thinking a lot about designing. For months, I’ve been designing a three-part series for people who want to learn the essence of elegant meeting facilitation. There is nothing more satisfying to me than designing an agenda, or a curriculum. It is a creative and logical process that uses every once (gram!)…

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Eight Ways to Process a Tragedy

Note: I am making a few changes to this blog as more accurate news emerges and I gain more perspective from wise colleagues. A terrorist, racist hate crime happened in my city just before the long Memorial day weekend, and at the start of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting and reflection for Muslims around…

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When You and the Group Are in the “Abyss”: What to Do About It

Otto Scharmer and his team have been exploring a model called Theory U for several decades. More and more I find myself drawn to it as a metaphor for the journey I go on with a group. The Theory U team speak of a great divide, a chasm which we must cross with a group…

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Are Learning Styles Really Going Out of Style?

It all started when I read an article re-posted by my Australian colleague that was titled, “The concept of different “learning styles” is one of the greatest neuroscience myths”. Like many of my colleagues, I have been a proponent of using a variety of participation formats in all my meetings. And, I have no doubt…

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Time – The Ultimate Asset in Meetings

Today’s blog is about a topic I have never written about but it is SO important, I do not know why it has taken me 75 blogs to get to it. It also is extremely difficult to give you a really good tool for what I want to convey to you. I don’t know of…

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5 Big Differences Between Training and Facilitation

Why this topic? The reason I’m addressing the topic is that many of us think that training done interactively is very close to or even the same as facilitation. It can feel like that but there is an essential and critical difference. This blog will cover those differences, talk about the benefits and when to…

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