Adventures in facilitation (in London!)

I like this cartoon by Hugh MacLeod (you can subscribe to his daily cartoon here) because it captures how I’m feeling about a visit to London and surrounds in September and October. It will be an adventure in many ways.

You might have heard me bang on about facilitation from time-to-time. Okay, a lot then. I find facilitating endlessly fascinating. There’s a different group, a different dynamic every time. Hence my own response is different. Changing. Evolving.

So I’m excited to be able to share some of what I’ve learnt about facilitating at a Facilitating With Confidence course in London. Let me say that again, just in case you missed it: Facilitating With Confidence in London! Woot! And best of all, for me, and anyone who comes along, is that I’ll have two brilliant co-facilitators at my side: Johnnie Moore and Trish Stevenson.

And what if nobody comes says that little voice in my head? No problem, I still get to spend time with Johnnie and Trish, and who knows what else we might cook up?

It will be an adventure no matter what. And it’d be really cool to share it with you or people you know. I can guarantee some fun, some laughter and you will even learn a few things about facilitating – just as I will continue to learn from you.

Everything else you want to know can be found here (including registration details). Or if you want to skip the blurb you can go straight to registration.

Part 1: 20 – 22 September 2010

Part 2: 4 – 6 October 2010

Wallacespace Covent Garden, 2 Dryden Street, London UK

Early-bird rates till 31 August, group rates available and special rates if you ask us nicely.

Open Space Learning

We are not inviting our clients to engage in risky behavior. Quite the opposite, we are opening a space in which they can really be themselves. And the real risk is to continue with the non-productive, guilt inducing, dependant behavior. – Harrison Owen

Anyone confronted with an Open Space meeting for the first time is often thrust in to what I call ‘open space shock’. We are so used to being told what to do, where to go, and when, that when faced with a self-organising system, we sometimes doubt our own ability to respond.

I see this in all sort of ways: people asking for guidance, grumbling about the ‘lack of organisation’ and fears that no-one would ever come to a meeting or conference where they are responsible for creating the agenda. There’s a fear that we all seem to carry that we’re not good enough – our thoughts, our ideas, our experiences – so we default to relying on others. Open Space puts us all right back in the centre.

One of the many reasons I continue to use open space and explore its effects on people and organisations, is because of the reactions of people and the changes that emerge once they are involved in open space. Experiences are often good, sometimes not – all are legitimate. Why is it that a process like open space can engender so many reactions?

Harrison Owen again - It is not about doing something new, or internalizing some new truth — but rather remembering what we already knew and doing what we should/could have been doing in the first place.

If you’d like to join us on the journey – and also learn the basics of facilitating open space – Andrew Rixon and I will be leading a two-day learning event in Melbourne on June 16 & 17. There’s more information here.

Gibberish. Brilliant!

In November last year, after the Applied Improv Conference,  I wrote a note on my blog that said this: “There are so many applications for gibberish in facilitation that I don’t know where to start. Don’t know why I haven’t used gibberish much before – that’s about to change!”

Last week I finally got around to using gibberish in a workshop with people from all different countries – many of them with English as a second language. I was co-facilitating with Johnnie Moore and we were egging each other on to take risks (one of the joys of co-facilitating I discovered, much better than the critical voice in my own head!)

I was only marginally more experienced with gibberish than the participants, and they got it straight away. Maybe they liked how levelling it was, or how delightful it is to ask a partner to do something in gibberish and for them to understand, or how gibberish translator creates the sort of laughter that comes from deep inside, and feels oh, so good. Makes me smile just writing about it and remembering the playfulness and joy on the faces of the participants. How often do we see that in workshops?

Wondering what to do next I said, “there’s an app for that.” I wasn’t kidding. On my iPhone is the app iProv, 250+ improv games – shake the phone and it randomly chooses one. We looked up gibberish in the index and found Gibberish Reunion. Here’s what it said:

A group of improvisers enter a playing area speaking gibberish. They are at a reunion, not having seen each other for quite some time. After a few minutes of catching up in their native language, they gather in a circle and begin to sing gibberish songs they all know.

Neither of us had done this before, but what the heck – it was worth trying. There were four small groups. We introduced the reunion game and they jumped right in. Before long there were songs and dancing and eventually they ‘noticed’ the other groups and before long there was one huge reunion and everyone singing – all in gibberish. Brilliant!

Oh, and the purpose of the workshop, and why gibberish? Why games?  There are lots of ways for me to explore my own reactions, strengths, challenges, what inspires me, what stops me dead in my tracks, and how I react under stress. But none of them are as good, or as much fun, as playing improv games. I see patterns of behaviour, in myself and others. I become aware of blocking, in myself and in others. I learn about myself and others.

And thanks to my playback buddies at Melbourne Playback Theatre Company for reminding me that we act our way into a new way of thinking rather than think our way into a new way of acting. Improv games provide the ideal vehicle to act differently, to be playful, to discover stuff about how we interact with each other and our work.

So when the brief asks for building resilience and confidence amongst the participants to operate effectively in chaos, what better vehicle than improv? Can we measure what they learned? No. Maybe even the participants are unsure what they learned. Learning and insight emerge, and can’t be regulated by the clock. Some people went away with huge insights about how they might respond differently, better even, in the stressful work they do. Others had huge ah-ha moments about themselves. For others, who knows? At least we know they had fun, and will remember the games. Maybe they’ll even remember them when next faced with responding to an emergency that requires all of their skill, attention, compassion and focus.

Learning Open Space Technology

For a few years now, I’ve been offering Open Space Technology training with the late Fr Brian Bainbridge. I know that Brian would want the training to continue, so I’m pleased that Andrew Rixon has stepped into the breach.

Andrew and I will be offering a two-day training on June 16 & 17 in Melbourne.

There’s more information here.

Facilitating With Confidence 2010

Anne Pattillo and I are happy to announce dates for Facilitating With Confidence Training in Australia and New Zealand.

Melbourne, Australia.
A six-day comprehensive course will be offered over three, two-day blocks.
May 25 – 26, June 22 – 23 and July 20 – 21

Wellington, New Zealand
A five-day block course 12 – 16 July

London, England
Dates for a two-day ‘taster’ to be announced soon.

For more details send us an email info@facilitatingwithconfidence.com

The essence of learning facilitation

We are all facilitators. Some of us embrace facilitation and some of us are happy to leave it to others. It’s basically getting a group to work together. Facilitators are everywhere. On construction sites, in homes, on the internet, in offices. You don’t do the work for others, you get them working together. It might be manual work, it might be creative, it might be ordinary, every-day work, and it might be for something special.

Part of my art as a facilitator is to share what I know with others. To be accessible. To be generous. So when I was asked the other day what the learning outcomes would be for a facilitation training, I answered in a way that even surprised me. And in a way that excites me for this work. And in a way that sits well with me. It’s not about learning more techniques – you can find that in the internet; it’s not about knowing what to do in what situation – that comes from experience; and it’s certainly not about following any pre-determined plan or manual or guidelines or recipe.

Sharing the art of facilitation is to create an enthusiasm and excitement for facilitation, and a desire to continually explore and learn.

This is my challenge. This is my art. This is what we can do together.

There is no manual

I once worked with a young woman who wanted to know, at every turn, what she should do, how she should do it. She was smart, passionate and able – yet she was gripped by fear. Gripped by the fear of not doing it ‘right’. The problem was, and is, that there is no manual – there is no ‘right’ way. As Seth Godin would put it – she was in the grip of her lizard brain, that primitive part of our brain that is either hungry, scared, angry or horny. It’s the reason we are afraid. I heard that she’d recently had a baby. I hope she’s worked out how to tame that lizard brain because I’m pretty sure there’s no manual for raising a child either.

This is the premise of Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin. We have a choice to stay stuck, or we can embrace the fear and create some momentum. That’s the good news. The bad news is that our conditioning, and that damn lizard brain, might stop us. We’re conditioned to fit in, not stand out. We’re conditioned to deny our own genius, our art – whatever it is – because we might fail and then the lizard brain can say ‘told you so!’. We fear failure to the point where we don’t even try. Prototyping is all about trying and discarding. Accepting failure. Our lizard brain doesn’t like failure. It once meant we were probably dead, a tasty meal for some predator.

The predators today are no less fearful – it’s just that they are harder to recognise. Security, compensation for our labour, following the rules. These are the things that prevent us from embracing our art and sharing it with the world. Not because we want to get paid, but because there’s nothing else we CAN do, but share our art. Share our passion. We have to accept that it might not work and do it anyway.

Generosity is at the heart of Linchpin, gifting our art to others, not for something in return, not for a later transaction, but for the human to human connection. And for movement. If you’re stuck there’s no movement. It’s hard to be generous if you’re stuck.

There’s no ‘how to’ in this book. It’s a description of what the world needs, and Godin suggests each of us needs to find our own way, create our own map, forge our own future, share our own art, find others who will share the passion and momentum rather than hold us back with the threat of ‘not safe, not secure, not wise’. It’s not  a bad description of how to navigate a complex world where even if there was a manual, it would be out of date before you finished reading it.

Nancy White in Australia

One of the joys of blogging is ‘meeting’ people who challenge, inspire and are creative. Nancy White is one of those people and one day we WILL meet, face-to-face.

But not this November.

While I’m in Nancy’s home territory – the Pacific North West of the USA – Nancy will be visiting Australia and conducting a series of workshops.

If you are reading this and you are in Australia in November – unlike me! – please take advantage of this opportunity to meet Nancy and learn from her amazing work. Oh, and say hello from me.

The pic is of Columbia River Gorge taken just a few days ago.

Insanely Great Slideshows

Some of you might know that Geoff Brown and I have been playing with slideshows – learning ourselves how to make them insanely great and providing some training to share what we’ve learned with others. Two of our key influencers have been Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen guru and Nancy Duarte, slide:ology guru

You can go here and see three short videos of them chatting casually about three key questioons they often get about slideshows:

1. How do your methodologies apply to scientific or technical presentations?

2. How many slides should I use?

3. If we simplify our slides using your methodology and then need to circulate the slides how do people know what the content of the presentation was?

Well worth a look.

Geoff has been facilitating a conference where we had an opportunity to work with the keynote speakers to help them develop insanely great slideshows. Apparently they did a fantastic job and the audience was wowed! Importantly, the audience is more likely to remember their messages.

At some facilitation training I delivered recently in Indonesia I used a slideshow where I incorporated much of what I’ve learnt. Even without additional training this influenced people present to try their hand at simplifying their messages and using more images.

Both these examples are great feedback for us and is what encourages us to continue to offer this low-key, and seemingly impactful training. Okay, that’s the sales pitch – the real reason we do it is cos we can make some money and have fun while doing so. Oh, and work together too. That’s always fun.

Photo credit: www.iStockphoto.com

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.