by John Brooker | Aug 31, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Overcome Challenges
“Be absolutely clear on the outcome (s) wanted and stay out of content. These are my two top tips.” John Brooker If you want to enhance your meeting facilitation, here are some tips I provide people on my courses. This week I had a note from a reader. He has several meetings to facilitate and asked if I could send him a copy of my “top ten tips for facilitation” that he had accidentally erased from his computer. I thought this might be the trigger for a new blog. Unable to find a previous article on this topic, it is with thanks to Tariq that I provide you with those top ten tips and a few more. I trust you will find them useful. Know your outcome and output Be absolutely clear on the required outcome, (e.g. “The Group will have created clear options for improved service in key areas”) and output of the meeting, (e.g. a report detailing those options). Be clear overall and for every session in it. This is the first tip, as everything flows from this. Focus on process not content Your role as a facilitator is to focus on the process. If you get involved in the content, you become a participant and that makes life difficult. If you have a stake in the content, if this project is your baby, ask someone to baby-sit for you! Think PACE Maintain pace As a facilitator you should consider PACE when designing and facilitating a meeting. Process – Attendees – Content – Environment Maintaining pace is important too! Your meeting should pulse with energy like a...
by John Brooker | Aug 17, 2015 | Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Overcome Challenges
“The client workshops have been a real success.” Director of Global Strategic Marketing How to improve client relationships The Director of Global Strategic Marketing in a large multinational company asked me if I could help them enhance a number of information gathering workshops during their annual corporate customer meeting? They told me that the intent of this day of the meeting is to: Provide customers with an overview of the product roadmaps and gain their feedback and input Explain the potential enhancements to products and gain a sense of customer priorities The workshops are run by Product and Relationship Managers more used to presenting and gathering information in smaller meetings. When running workshops in previous years, they had found it difficult to obtain the quantity and quality of advice they need and involve and interest all of the customers. Consequently, they wanted guidance on how to design and facilitate the workshops. To meet this need I ran a one day development workshop to highlight the importance of creating the right climate, show the value of a participative and interesting approach and develop facilitator confidence. So It was a very successful workshop and I thought it would be useful to share the learning with fellow Gorillas should you need to run multiple client (or staff) workshops. Due to space limitations I have limited this article to key points. If you would like to read the full case study with full learning points, please click here and download “Obtain Better Advice From Clients” from the articles page. Create the Right Climate If you are running a workshop that lasts one...
by John Brooker | Aug 16, 2015 | Develop Opportunities, Innovate
“Do not to bring living hens into mountainous people’s houses.” Vietminh Recommendation How can you use guerrilla tactics to inject creativity in your organisation? A few years ago, I tutored one of my regular MBA residential courses on Creativity and Innovation. A student was convinced that she would not be able to use creative tools in her work place; she was a solicitor in a firm of solicitors and she thought that her rather conservative colleagues would not accept such tools and that rules and procedures would inhibit them. Some of you might be in a similar situation and might need to adopt “creative guerrilla” tactics (a term I first saw used in the Open University course on Creativity and Innovation) to introduce creativity into your organisation. Rather than launch into a list of tactics, I thought it would be interesting to use analogical idea generation, considering some tactics of military guerrillas and relating them to the organisation. Just as a “health warning”, I am not making any political comment about guerrillas or the Vietminh here! Analogy is a proven way to generate ideas, especially if you are stuck and it is useful to find interesting analogies. SO Here are some guerrilla tactics, not in order of importance and some ways you might adapt them. I don’t pretend it is exhaustive; as you read, think of other ways. Recruit like minded people and operate in small groups Find others in your organisation that think like you and create a network Help each other to build your skills and knowledge of tools Confront small groups, not the full force Expand...
by John Brooker | Aug 14, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Overcome Challenges, Tools
“First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” John F. Kennedy, former US President How might you gain a better understanding of your goals and challenges? Kennedy made the above point in a “State of the Union” speech to the US Congress on 25 May 1961. Whilst most countries would probably dedicate a whole speech on the subject, the moon landing was one of eight strategic goals that Kennedy spoke about and was just one of the four space initiatives that included communication and weather satellites! The reason for starting with this moon landing story is to illustrate that whatever your goal, it will form part of a taller and wider hierarchy that you can represent on a map. For example, a more operational goal would be “Enable astronauts to write in weightless environments.” (This might remind you of the story that the USA spent millions of dollars inventing a pen to write in space whilst the USSR used a pencil. People often cite this story as a reason to find the simplest solution, however, please see my closing story for a different insight.) SO If your goal is very strategic and you wish to understand the hierarchy of goals beneath it, you can use a Level Map. This enables you to: • Diagram that hierarchy and see the relationships before you choose one to work on. • Chunk the goal into lower level goals, thus increasing the potential goals to achieve and reducing the...
by John Brooker | Aug 13, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Free Articles, Innovate
“They bartered, they smuggled and some sneakily stole from the opposite side to get a taster of the forbidden food.” Rachel Khoo TV Chef What might the benefits of innovative thinking be in your organisation? Recently, I came back from a walk one Saturday morning and the TV was on. The show was “The Little Paris Kitchen” hosted by Rachel Khoo. Rachel is primarily a culinary events organiser, many of which you can see on her site (of interest if you are looking for something different for your next corporate event!). In the show, chef Rachel used her 21 square metres Parisian flat as a restaurant with one table and a kitchen so tiny you can’t fit a full size chicken in the oven. It was innovative. It set me thinking about innovation and how, if it can be done in a tiny kitchen, it can be done anywhere, with often minimal resources. When you mention innovation there’s always a tendency for people to think of Apple and its products, or Amazon and its business model; innovation does not have to be that large scale or confined to products and delivery channels. Neither does it have to be the domain of the “expert”. Rachel Khoo was working in London as a PR for a fashion brand before she picked up her case and moved to Paris. She signed up to learn French and patisserie making when she got there. SO People can apply innovative thinking anywhere across an organisation. Why would your organisation want people to do that? Here are three reasons: Financial Organisations tend to introduce new...
by John Brooker | Jul 31, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges, Tools
“There is no truth. Only perception.” Edith Sitwell (English Author) Looking at a challenge in a fresh way can transform how you tackle it… Once, I gave an after dinner talk for around 80 college lecturers and examiners attending a seminar on innovation in assessment. The premise of my talk, more an interactive lecture, was that if we could inspire people to enjoy the whole process of exams, it would reap benefits for the college and be an innovation in assessment. This idea underpinned a study day that my friend, Elvin Box, and I ran for many years, for MBA students studying Creativity, Innovation and Change. We challenged the students to enjoy and look forward to the exam rather than dread it. I had happily accepted the challenge of giving the talk, but a couple of weeks after accepting I became a little nervous, wondering what I would find to talk about that would interest and be of use to the audience. I didn’t realise how nervous I was until one night, I had a dream. In it I was delivering the talk and in front of everybody, could not think of a thing to say. In the dream, (this is absolutely true) Piers Brosnan , ex – James Bond and erstwhile singer in “Mamma Mia,” appeared and sagely told me all I needed to know. He may even have sung it, I don’t recall because when I awoke, I had forgotten all he told me! However, some of you will recognise the type of dream as the “examination dream”, one I used to have regularly before appearing in plays, constantly forgetting...
