facilitator techniques

The Art of Mixing and Matching Techniques – What to Do and Not Do

In a recent facilitation, my colleague, Rangineh Azimzadeh Tehrani of Solh Resolutions International and I discussed the design of something fairly complex in a short amount of time. It was a job for Mercy Corps and members temporarily called “Women’s Philanthropy Group”. We had several lofty objectives! In this blog, we talk about what makes a…

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Sharpening the Focus on Your Meeting Outcomes

The new year seems like a good time to talk about setting goals. However, I’d actually like to talk to you about setting the objectives or aims of all of your different meetings and discussions. In ToP language, we call this the rational and experiential aims. Knowing how to craft very focused aims has been…

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When Dot Voting is Unfair and Ineffective – What to Do Instead

I think everyone I know who has heard about facilitation or practices it, also knows about dot voting. It may be one of the most popular yet misused tools I’ve ever encountered in the field. I feel so strongly about it’s misuse that I’ve probably only used it twice in my entire career. Those two…

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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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People Dozing in Your Meetings? 7 Ways to Get Their Attention

There are some interesting statistics about meetings that I’ve been coming across while creating two new simpler levels of Meetings that Rock online course that are going to be launched in the next few months. For example, one statistic said that 91% admit to daydreaming in meetings and 39% admit to dozing off! Here is…

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“A Hero’s Journey” – A Model to Help Groups Through Big Change

Recently, I had the pleasure of being reminded of a model that I think serves facilitators and their groups well.  It is Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”.    I was co-facilitating a plenary session with my dear ICA colleague, Jo Nelson who works with ICA Canada.  She had the idea of using the theme of the Hero’s…

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