by John Brooker | Sep 4, 2015 | Facilitate meetings, Tools
“Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating.”
Charles Kaufmann, Screenwriter How can you hear from all of your team efficiently in meetings? Anyone who has attended facilitation training with me, or has read many Yes! And. Blogs, is aware that I advocate you break a group in to small teams (preferably three in a team) for discussion and exercises and constant changing the structure of the teams. I bring the small teams back together as a group to share and consolidate their findings. This approach encourages divergent thinking and allows everyone to participate and have their say. It has much more energy. Quieter people tend to become more involved. Moving people around provides variety and interest. It is usually quicker and more productive than whole group discussion. A wider range of ideas surfaces too because the group is not led by the thinking of just one person and there is less opportunity for people to be bored. Recently though, I ran a workshop where the client wanted to ensure that everyone heard the opinion of each person in the team, at least once in the meeting, because it was a fairly new team. I thought readers might find it useful to know the two tools I used. Ralph Watson, a Blog reader suggested the name, “The Doughnut” for tool 1. Feel free to call them what you like. So Tool 1 – The Doughnut There was a team of 11 people. They wanted to discuss what their focus should be as a team. I placed six people in a circle facing each other and had the rest of the group sit...
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 | Jul 30, 2015 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges, Solution Focus
“Where a minute before a handful of tech guys could agree on almost nothing, it took us only five minutes to identify the future perfect on which we all agreed.” Niklas Tiger. Managing Director of Hi5, Sweden. Want to solve challenges more effectively? How many meetings have you been in where you have tried to tackle a challenge in a team and it just kept going round in circles? The following is a true story related by Niklas Tiger, Managing Director of Hi5, an IT organisation in Sweden that provides outsourced IT services to customers over the Internet. Hi5 is not a client of ours but Niklas has given us permission to create an article as an example of how the Solution Focus approach to tackling challenges and change can work. (Please click on the link to read an article on Solutions Focus). I have adapted the wording for clarity slightly; otherwise this is his story, which, as it is from an organisation, I thought would be valuable for you. If you would rather read this article in an illustrated short ebook, please click here ebook A tale of two meetings. “Implementing Solutions Focus (SF) as a way of managing change in our organisation and also in collaboration with customers, really has transformed our company. A very low tech down to earth example of this happened as recently as this...
by John Brooker | Jul 20, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Tools
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” John Steinbeck, Author You can make an idea generation session run more effectively with these tips. This week, I ran a creative thinking workshop for a client. I showed them how to build the climate and introduced tools for creating solutions. They were particularly keen to know how they might best apply the tools in their own workshops. Instead of pre-designing a session on this latter topic, I ran an “ad lib” session. That means the participants identify the concerns they have about running a session and I answer them. This is something I enjoy doing as an experienced facilitator and like most improvisation work, is very rewarding. I thought it would be useful to write an article on this topic for you and so here are some of the concerns and my responses. Please see Yes! And blog 136 for a selection of tools you might use. 1. How to get people to attend: Schedule a few short sessions rather than a long single session. Provide a brief that explains the purpose and outcomes and make it sound interesting. 2. People are silent, no ideas are forthcoming: This usually occurs as a result of inhibition (e.g. different status) or participant style. To overcome this, start with a “Vent”, i.e. have everybody generate ideas individually without speaking and note these down. Once these are exhausted, share and record them one at a time. 3. People are not participating: This usually arises when people work in teams that are too...
by John Brooker | Sep 9, 2014 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Collaborate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla #174 How can participants improve the meetings they are in? This is the first time I have run someone else’s blog in the Creative Gorilla. However, I think this blog from American facilitator Steve Davis is very useful. Group Process Skill As the information age races on, we find ourselves facing constant change, a global economy open for business around the clock, and increasingly complex challenges. With much of this work done virtually, via the telephone or the Internet, we’re becoming more isolated than ever and left yearning for human contact. To keep the machine chugging along, we find ourselves attending more and more meetings to keep up to speed and to stay connected. Research shows that a great percentage of these meetings are run poorly, resulting in huge losses of time and productivity. Why is this? I believe that there are three main reasons meetings continue to leave us wanting:
1) People underestimate the complexity of group thought.
2) Few people are trained in meeting facilitation skills.
3) Boggled by group complexity and lacking requisite skills, people fall into dysfunctional patterns of action or inaction, failing to do anything to change meeting dynamics. Given that in any given group there are, on average, eight times more participants than there are meeting leaders, targeting meeting leaders alone in our efforts to improve meetings may be missing the mark. What if we were to arm meeting participants with the basic knowledge, skills, and attitudes they could use to contribute to keeping their groups on track and moving forward? The 12 Acts below...
