facilitation

I was recently helping a colleague think through a collaborative workshop design and was introduced to the idea of the six-word memoir. According to SMITH Magazine, Earnest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words. His response was: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  Brilliant.

My colleague Kristen proposed to use a six-word story activity as a way of establishing a current state snapshot as to where an organization is in an initiative.

We let our guard down during this Friday’s Transcribe and discussed what we fear as facilitators of change. Though each member of our team has varying degrees of experience as a facilitator, we found many shared fears and effective practices to overcome them.

Illustrated by Michelle Wright

There is a moment before stepping out in front of a group of people who have come together to tackle a problem that requires all of your attention and ability when you have a decision to make. You can choose to approach the unknown as palpable ambiguity or malleable possibility. During this Friday’s Transcribe, we here at Collective Next discussed how we attempt to balance the necessary tight rope walk of preventing the bottom from dropping out and blowing the roof off of any situation.

Today in the Lab, we discussed a concept that is very near and dear to our Collective hearts. Through a discussion that went in a variety of directions (and inspired by conversations that we had been having for a while), we came up with an axiom: Good Leadership is Good Facilitation and Good Facilitation is Good Leadership.

While this concept has a lot of subtle nuances there were a couple of common characteristics that should be core to facilitators and leaders alike: Situational Awareness and Having Empathy and Compassion.

In last Friday's Transcribe, we discussed how a session is like a good book, you are engaged from start to finish, you experience each twist and turn side by side with the main characters, and it leaves you thinking in ways you had not considered before.

Collective Next has run hundreds of strategic offsites over the years and while each one presents its own unique challenges in both design and delivery, there are a few guiding design principles we try to use when approachin them with our clients.  Here are five basic no-no's we strive to maintain.

No PowerPoint
PowerPoint has been an easy target for years so this should be no surprise that it tops our list.  Nothing new here regarding its tiresome overuse, which has spawned such phrases as "death by powerpoint" and articles like the NY Times