by John Brooker | May 15, 2012 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles
Yes! And… Creative Gorilla # 125 How can you facilitate more effectively as an organisational leader…… “Like baby, baby, baby oh, I thought you’d always be mine” Lyrics , Justin Bieber How do you facilitate as an internal creative leader in the organisation? Last night I read an article, which stated that coaching is a lot easier for external coaches than internal leaders. As I tramped through the woods this morning, I thought about this, as people in organisations regularly say to me that it is a lot easier for an external facilitator to facilitate a group. Overall, I agree and as I walked, I thought about the issues that people in organisations have and how they might overcome them. Here are my thoughts in a question and answer format: 1. How to facilitate when you want or need to contribute? Response: Understand the different roles in a meeting. The facilitator manages the process, the attendees deal with the content. One way to overcome the issue is to make clear you are stepping in to an attendee role by creating a facilitator space and a contributor space in the room. Tell the others this and physically move between spaces when you need to contribute. (Michael Grinder, a communications expert, calls this “decontamination”). A second way is to agree with a colleague that they will facilitate parts of the meeting where you must contribute; a good way to ease others in to facilitating. 2. How to find time to prepare? Response: Share out different sessions in a meeting amongst your team and have people design and facilitate them. This involves...
by John Brooker | Jan 21, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Facilitate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla # 21 Creative leaders have a number of qualities, what do you think they are? “She accomplished more in her 28 years than most people do in a lifetime” Patrick Leahy US Senator Browsing at the station newsvendor at St Paul’s, the leader article in the Independent stood out. A “framed” photograph of a young woman who was not a celebrity, but one whose life we should celebrate. Maria Ruzicka was the unlucky victim of a bomb in Iraq and someone who, from the evidence in the article and whatever your political views, could teach us lessons about the qualities of being a creative leader. Try to pick them out in this brief story. Maria was an American aid worker in Iraq. She was driven by a simple premise: if the US caused suffering it should try and help the innocent people who suffered. As such, she established a charity, CIVIC, to provide relief for the innocent victims of the war. She negotiated government bureaucracy in Washington and personally lobbied senators to secure $10 million funding to help people who had lost the family breadwinner. In Iraq, she cultivated those US officials that decided who would receive compensation, to speed compensation to the right people. In addition, she used her prodigious energy to successfully pester diplomats for aid, cajole journalists for promotion and to console victims who considered her a warm and open hearted person. So What qualities did you identify? I identified these: A strong set of values A clear premise on which to work Vision – a well defined goal Self confidence...
by John Brooker | Jan 16, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Facilitate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla # 16 You have a choice of techniques you can use to tackle your challenges, mix and match them. “Lister: “They’re not comin’ back… I’m lost in deep space… I’m three million years from home… No life, no bed, no nothin’… Just me… and 3 1/2 tons of curry. [pause] Fan-smeggin-TASTIC!” (From, Red Dwarf, a UK TV programme) It is 11.00 p.m. You have been out for the night in a Welsh town. It is too far to walk home so you want to get a taxi. You are also hungry and want an Indian meal. Unfortunately, you have only enough money either for the taxi or the curry. How might you satisfy both needs?? I was at dinner with a team from a client the other day and one of them, Duncan, recounted the story above. His solution was both funny and ingenious. He knew the restaurant would deliver meals over a certain cost to your home. So he went in, ordered a home delivery meal and then asked if they could drop him off at the same time as the meal. Which they did! I thought Duncan’s solution showed real creativity so let’s analyse it to see what we can learn about the creative process. First, he proved a formula of creativity, Creativity = Knowledge x Imagination x Evaluation [source Parnes, with thanks to Min Basadur for providing the reference]. I will leave you to work out how Duncan proved C. He also proved, (by asking for what he wanted), that creativity is useful only if we add the...
by John Brooker | Jan 14, 2012 | Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Facilitate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla # 14 We owe people who attend our presentations or training courses the right to some creativity… “This is a battle, a war and the casualties could be your hearts and minds” Robin Williams in the film “Dead Poets Society” This week I facilitated a course for trainees who are not professional trainers but provide training as part of their role. The majority of them train on technical or process topics and to date their delivery has consisted mainly of PowerPoint presentations and talking to the audience, with a few exercises included. The key challenge I posed the participants was “How might you provide your course (or presentation) without a single PowerPoint slide?” The most rewarding part of the course for me was to observe people move from a state of scepticism, (“Well, I can see it working on soft subjects but it wouldn’t work with my technical topic”), to a state of enthusiasm, keen to try new ways to share information, help people recall it and encourage them to use the knowledge they gain. One of my inspirations for the course is the film “Dead Poets Society”, set in a top American preparatory school in the late 1950’s. Robin Williams as the English teacher avoids the tedium of “chalk and talk” (Didn’t they have PowerPoint in the Fifties Daddy?) and rote learning. He wins over his sceptical pupils by involving their minds, body and emotions in learning, so that they truly understand the message and meaning in every poem. He uses methods that will inspire them to recall the...
by John Brooker | Jan 12, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Facilitate, Innovate, Transform – Creative Gorilla # 12 If you seek a way to challenge conventional thinking, try this technique… “Not even the fastest, most modern jet can come close to matching Santa’s speed.” Petty Officer Bev Allen, NORAD If you are looking for a way to challenge conventional thinking, might Santa give you food for thought? On Christmas Eve my children had great fun (me too!) tracking Santa’s progress towards London on the web site www.noradsanta.org (NORAD is a US / Canadian military radar defence organisation. If you have young kids, do check out their Santa site next year). As we watched videos of Santa crossing many different cities in the world the children marvelled at the speed at which he progressed and the idea for this article sprang to mind. Thanks for the unexpected present Santa (and the people at NORAD). A technique you can use to challenge convention is to ask the “What If” question. What if we had to deliver these goods to millions of customers in the world in one night? (Wonder where that idea came from?). What if we could reduce the lead-time for this process from sixty days to one? What if we had a policy of NO redundancies? If you examine these questions, you should see that they are challenging accepted norms, the “rules” and the assumptions (which may be implicit) about a situation. “It takes sixty days to process this form”. “If business slows down, we make people redundant”. You can use the question as a stand-alone technique to aid your creative thinking but I find a...
