facilitate-pro

Exploring Innovation in Community Development Finance may seem like a dry topic but the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s recent conference was anything but. From the beginning the planning team laid out the objective of providing a highly interactive event that recognized the interesting experiences and ideas that each participant brings and the value in facilitating connections. The opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations with other attendees has become a hallmark of this bi-annual... Read Full Story

In a webinar earlier this year sponsored by NewWOW (New Ways of Working),  David Coleman posed a provocative question: “In the world of enterprise social collaboration, has the social construct of “meetings” become anachronistic? In other words, are meetings obsolete?” I asked a couple of participants to reflect on this question – Editor. In a recent session for NewWow that I led with my colleague Julia Young ( Planning and Running Exceptional Virtual Meetings ), a  participant posed a... Read Full Story

We’ve all been there.  You’re asked to participate in a chaotic exercise billed as a brainstorming session. The moderator instructs you to “think outside the box,” tells you that the activity is penalty free (“no idea is a bad idea”) and then waits expectantly. But without design or instruction, some participants sit there apathetically, others contribute sporadically, and a few loudly dominate the session with their pet ideas.  McKinsey Quarterly recently published an article that proposes... Read Full Story

Going through some articles I’d bookmarked for later reading, I came across a commentary by Reid Hastie, a professor at U of Chicago in the NY Times that resonated with me.  He wrote: “ Once meetings are over, we don’t effectively assign responsibility for a bad meeting or take personal responsibility as we should. Sure, someone called the meeting, but we all leave it unhappy and blaming everyone, including ourselves. Psychologists call this “diffusion of responsibility” and one consequence... Read Full Story

Up until a few years ago, those of us who are professional facilitators were considered to be a breed apart. People turned to us for special ways of extracting the best ideas from a group, weaving together a stimulating conversation (even when people had wildly different perspectives), or helping people reach consensus on difficult decisions. Fortunately for us, our clients still value our ability to plan and guide productive conversations when the outcomes matter most. And yet—I see more... Read Full Story

Are your teams connected for productivity or wired for distraction? This free webinar takes a slightly different twist in the ongoing exploration of how to design highly interactive webinars and virtual meetings that keep people engaged . One of the biggest challenges facilitators and trainers face is the effect of participants multi-tasking on the productivity and creativity of the group.  The first reaction is to think about how to STOP participants from multi-tasking so that they will... Read Full Story

A recent article in The NY Times about young people Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction got me thinking about the impact in the business world of instant communication and the resulting tendency to multi-task. Here is my point counter-point on the subject. On the one hand … Multi-tasking helps me respond to lots of little tasks and requests that arrive throughout the day while focusing on one main activity at a time. A quick response to an email or text message may be all that is... Read Full Story

The Number One Challenge that facilitators and trainers have with virtual meetings and webinars is: How to keep participants engaged? I suggest that this is directly related to the Number One Trap that we fall into when moving from face-to-face to virtual events: starting with a piece of technology and then trying to make engagement happen. While technology can accelerate great communication, meeting effectiveness and virtual teamwork, it cannot create it. Rather we need to 1) start with our... Read Full Story

A  recent post on a site called iPad CTO caught my eye because its title: Increase Productivity with iPad-driven Business Meetings . Yes indeed ! I thought – having just returned from an engagement where we used iPads to create a sense of intimate conversation amongst 400 people. The author of this post went on to posit: “ The legacy of business meetings – boring, counter-productive, and a constant interruption of real work – shows that little progress has been made over the last century... Read Full Story

One way to know that you’ve arrived at the very essence of an issue or solution is when you can articulate it completely and accurately in very few words.  That’s why good mission statements are short, some even crafted in a single phrase.  One description I like is “short enough to remember, and strong enough to inspire”.  And that’s why it sometimes takes a while to get it right. I and my colleagues at Facilitate.com have been in the business of helping people run excellent meetings... Read Full Story