Normal operations will now resume

Tomorrow it’s September 1, so my experiment of posting every day during August has come to an end.

How was it for you?

Knowing that I’d committed to post every day meant I had to ‘live’ some of the improv principles that I often espouse. Often I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write until I sat down at my computer. On these occasions, I’d ‘start anywhere’ and ‘be average’, giving myself space to write something, anything and see what emerged. By ‘being average’ I allowed myself to explore whatever came up without judging or filtering. Often I was surprised with what I wrote. On other occasions I’d ‘write’ a post in my head during the day. Sometimes an idea would come from a conversation, from a blog post I’d read, or from something else that happened. Inspiration is everywhere!

Thanks for taking the journey with me.

The wordle above is made from all the posts in August.

A dilemma

Keith Sawyer has an interesting post about collaboration and learning. He concludes with this statement: “So many of our most important learning experiences happen when we are in groups with others, and this is why understanding collaboration is central to the study of learning.”

And therein lies the dilemma for those of us who work alone or in home-based businesses: how do we find opportunities to collaborate and therefore learn from others and enhance our own learning and creativity?

While skype and some of the social networking tools can help, nothing beats actually being together, f2f, in the same space, drinking coffee, tossing about ideas, sharing stuff and generally having wide-ranging discussions.

That’s why Moby in Torquay is my alternative office, where I’m always happy to meet up with others and chat.

The power of what’s not there

Is it a case of noticing what I’m primed to notice, or is it really a trend in the making? I’m talking about what’s not there, what we don’t do, what’s not included. Here’s the evidence

Open Space Technology: This is where I first heard the term ‘invisible facilitator’. And the term ‘do one less thing’. It’s the hardest part of learning to facilitate an open space meeting – learning to NOT do, rather than do.

White space: When I learnt some rudimentary principles of design, I learned about the impact of white space.

Twitter: Say what you need to say in 140 characters or less.

Garden design: Mass and void. Influenced by Gordon Ford and Japanese garden design and the natural order of things in nature, Sam Cox, described his philosophy of garden design around mass and void – leaving open space as a foil to the mass of plantings elsewhere. It also gives the eyes somewhere to rest.

Silence: So, so powerful. Asking a question and then being quiet. Attentive and silent. Present and silent. Giving someone else the space for them to fill however they wish.

The Naked Facilitator: A conference I helped organise a few years ago that focused on the basics, the fundamentals, getting rid of bells and whistles. Being authentic as a facilitator.

Insanely Great Slideshows: Focusing on what’s NOT said, on cutting back to the essence, on giving the audience the space to make sense themselves instead of ramming something down their throats.

Screenwriting: Learning to allow the action to say what needs to be said, instead of the dialogue.

Haiku: The Japanese poetry form that consists of three lines of five syllable, seven syllables, and five syllables. Here’s one of my favourites.

Accept offers, say
Yes! And… be open to the
ideas of others.

Advice from my mother: “If you’ve got nothing constructive to say, don’t say anything.”

A quote from our Facilitating With Confidence manifesto: “Our approach is bounded by the practice of light facilitation. Little effort, big impact.”

In Pursuit of Elegance by Matthew May: Arrived this week from the TED Book Club, a book that is subtitled Why the best ideas have something missing. Here is Guy Kawasaki’s 140 character (a la Twitter) foreword: “Less is the new more.” Easy to learn: symmetry, subtraction, and sustainability. Very valuable to do. Step 1: Read Matt’s book!!

What’s your examples?

Taking Stock

It doesn’t feel like it’s been all that remarkable, this week that’s just gone, until I look at all that’s happened.

• A collaboration involving five people from four countries was approved – enabling me to work with some great mates on a challenging and exciting project
• A good friend gave birth to her first child – always reason for celebration
• Another friend had confirmation of a new job and resigned his old one.
• There were numerous birthdays this week – what is it about the last week of August?
• My niece got married
• Anne Pattillo and I wrote a manifesto about our facilitation training, and tweaked the program
• Some strategy work in developing countries was confirmed
• Saw a remarkable one-man, 30 puppets play called Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy
• I helped a friend in Sweden design an important three-day workshop he’s facilitating in Paris this weekend
• My persistent cough finally packed up and left – for good, I hope!
• I took some half-decent photos on my new camera – in total manual mode (now to take some fully-decent ones)
• Caught up with another friend who has been overseas for the last seven weeks
• And had lunch with yet another friend who I hadn’t seen for about 10 years
• Spoke with at least 10 people on skype from six different countries
• Explained to my hairdresser how he could talk to his mum and his sister (in England) at the same time on skype using conference call
• Helped another friend who is making a documentary film organise a trip to the US, set up skype, and introduced him to people I know in places he’s visiting
• I read lots of inspirational blogs, funny blogs, shocking blogs; connected via Twitter and Facebook
• Three books arrived from the US courtesy of the TED book club

Sometimes it’s worth stopping to take stock.

Lucky I don’t have a real job!

Phew! Time for a drink, I reckon.

Here’s a Facilitating With Confidence manifesto 1.0

What’s catching my attention

Performance Reviews

I’d  had a discussion with a friend earlier this week about performance reviews. I haven’t heard many good comments about them. And luckily I don’t have to partake – my performance is reviewed, well, every time I perform! Alex Kjerulf posted this update on Facebook today:

The link he refers to – why performance reviews are a waste of time –  is well worth a look.

Also from Alex, this Dilbert cartoon

Visual, back-of-the-napkin explanation

Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin has created this explanation of the US health care system. As well as being informative, it’s a good example of visual story telling of a complicated issue.

More about the US health care system and town hall meetings

Chris Corrigan writes about what we can learn from disrupted meetings and about ‘chaordic confidence’

On writing a manifesto

Today Anne Pattillo and I wrote a manifesto about Facilitating With Confidence. It was a useful way to tease out our thinking and to surface the arguments that underpin what we do. It was also a great exercise in collaborative writing. Here’s how we did it.

We started by capturing key thoughts – in any order. Statements about the world as we experience it and what we believe.

We then put a bit of structure around these thoughts:

• What we are arguing
• Supporting information; why it matters? Why you should care?
• Our response: what does it mean to facilitate with confidence?
• What difference it will make in the world
• Our challenge to you

We then worked on our arguments. Using the classic journalists’ tool of the inverted pyramid, we ranked our arguments so as each subsequent one built on, or supported the previous one. An if you only read the first argument, then you would have ‘got it’.

Our final edit came not in our draft writing, but as we created the look of the manifesto. We used Apple’s Keynote to design the layout. The reasons will be the subject of another post one day. As we designed each page, we refined our language and the emphasis. It was creative, exciting work and we are very pleased with the outcome. The next step is to make a slideshow.

We’ve submitted a proposal to Change This and will let you know if our proposal is accepted. If so, we’ll be asking you to vote on us writing the full manifesto (even though we’ve already done that, we’ll be keeping it to ourselves for the time being).

I found it a useful process for becoming clear about what I stand for, and for explaining what’s important. More useful, even, than doing a vision and mission, or, heaven forbid, strategic planning!

Beyond resilience

Dave Pollard has an excellent post on resilience. Resilience is a bit of a catch phrase at the moment, and yes, guilty as charged, your honour. I’ve been pedalling the resilience story for a while now – individual, community, organisational, family.

As Dave says, resilience is about ‘springing back’, and embedded in that is the expectation that things will somehow, eventually get back to ‘normal’. We now know that there is no ‘normal’.

I’m particularly taken by his research that reveals that we need to adapt, and improvise. It’s so obvious when it’s presented this way, yet I’ve been blinded by the lure of resilience that I’ve neglected alternatives.

Great stuff. I’ve saved Dave’s post for further reference.

Stepping into manual photography

Here’s a photo that I took today. It’s unremarkable, really. And as I continue on my photographic journey I hope I will eventually have some remarkable photos to post. But back to this one. It represents a learning journey, because it’s one of the first photos I’ve taken on my gorgeous new Canon Powershot G10 camera using completely manual settings.

It’s SO easy to use a camera on automatic mode. Point and shoot. But I’ve found it’s made me lazy. I don’t think so much about the photo. I don’t consider the light and the composition. I don’t care enough.

So, I turned off the automatic function and re-learned ISO settings, shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field. I’m often frustrated when taking photos because I know what I want to acheive but am unsure how to do it.

As someone who makes a living out of training others, it’s a useful reminder to be the learner – to struggle with concepts, to try and fail, to feel the frustration, and the delight when I move a little closer to what I want to achieve. Today was another step on the journey.

Type

I’m not sure where my love of typography came from. Maybe it was when I did Media Studies at university and we visited newspaper publishers, being shown how it used to be done with trays of metal type and typesetters and forms and real leading. It was so intensive – and so beautiful, those metal letters.

No matter. It’s enduring. I love fonts. And the way type can evoke emotion.

If you want to explore typography here’s some of my favourite sites.

I Love Typography is a great place to start – with all sorts of cool info about fonts, old and new.

And, of course, Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame has lots to say about fonts. Like in his latest post.

You can even do a quiz to see what font represents you (hat tip to Garr Reynolds).

And my all time favourite is this video. Font Conference.