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.

Here’s a Facilitating With Confidence manifesto 1.0

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.

Rebooting

Last year, Anne Pattillo and I started up a new business together – Facilitating With Confidence. We’d tried our hands at facilitation training before and became frustrated when people learnt enough to ask us to come and do the tricky gigs, but didn’t have enough confidence to have a go themselves, even though we knew they were capable. Hence the name.

We’re passionate about building facilitation capacity in organisations and communities. So this weekend we’re having an Annual General Meeting! After all, it’s our responsibility as Directors of the company to have an AGM, surely!

So it might include some wining and dining as well. Have to keep our strength and spirits up while plotting, I mean planning, the NEXT BIG THING.

Let us know if you have any requests or ideas.

You say tomato, I say…

A friend, who shall remain nameless for the time being, wrote an update on Facebook the other day saying she had just bought a new bathing suit. Now apart from the fact that I am insanely jealous of seemingly EVERYONE ELSE in the world who is taking holidays right now, and I’m not, this little update got me thinking about language.

Bathing suit. In Australia that translates as bathers.

Swimming costume. Well, that’s obviously a cossie.

Then there’s swimmers, togs, Speedos, boardies and for men only, budgie smugglers.

I can’t stress how important it is to clarify the meaning of words. As I work more and more internationally, I find myself asking time and again: ‘what do you mean when you say [insert word]‘?

The more abstract the word, the more likely there is to be misunderstanding. I was once travelling through corn country in the US, from Indianapolis to Chicago. I was on an agricultural journalists’ tour. It was a lot of fun, there we were, a bunch of agricultural journos from around the world doing a road trip through wide open spaces, stopping to visit farmers. And the most amazing corn factory. They made everything out of corn. There were corn pens, and paper, and oil, and food. As far as I know the whole building was made of corn. But I digress. Apart from my accent meaning I was virtually unintelligible, obviously my questions made little sense too. We were visiting a farmer who had reclaimed a lot of marshy country. The water was collected into drains and flowed away. I asked where? He looked at me as if I was from another planet and answered, away. Obvious really. Then I asked about biodiversity. And his reply was that he grew corn and beans. Well, that’s OK then!

Over dinner one night I found myself having a heated discussion with a local journalist about organic agriculture. I don’t remember much, except the moment when I asked ‘what do you actually mean by organic?’ That’s when we discovered we were talking about two completely different things. There was some confusion regarding organic and biodynamic. Anyway, the lesson stuck. I’m reminded of this any time I ask someone what they mean by consensus, or outcome, or sustainable or even workshop! Or heaven forbid, facilitation.

It pays to clarify meaning, and simply illuminates how our different experiences manifest in the language we use.

No regrets decision making

I’m a bit wary of certainty. And sure, I like a bit of certainty as much as the next person. If I’m really honest, I’d let my inner control freak out and say I like being in control. That’s why my work is a constant challenge – staying open to possibility, exploring, being curious and staying engaged. I’m wary of people who have the answer – and it’s usually described as the ‘thing we’ve been waiting for’, the process or approach that is going to cut through all the complexity and mess we humans are prone to create and give us insight, or certainty, or even the ‘answer’.

I take part in a few email discussion lists. Sometimes people will ask for advice and there will be a rush of replies that basically say ‘I have the answer you need’. I don’t buy it.

So that means I’m also wary of goals, and objectives, and targets – not to mention key performance indicators and the like, but I digress. If I set a goal and focus on that, might I miss some opportunity because I’m so focused on the goal? And that is exactly what I mean by not having an answer. That question, I think, is unanswerable. In fact, I’m not really interested in the answer, it’s the dilemma that interests me. The exploration. But it’s so much easier to come up with answers, conclusions, outcomes – even if they are ultimately meaningless.

I am variously challenged and inspired by my friends Chris and Johhnie who have also written on this topic recently.

In the last week or so I’ve experienced for myself the highs and lows of certainty – or uncertainty, depending on your persepective!

My friend Brenda and her son Cameron helped me do some long overdue tinkering with my web site and email (and such nebulous entities known as servers and domains). What we expected might take a couple of hours took days – and is still underway (hence the lack of photos on my blog at the moment). When it comes to the internet I’ve found a curiousity, combined with trust in people who actually know what they are doing, invaluable. Otherwise it’s just plain frustrating.

At the other end of the spectrum was the beginning of a process to collaboratively design a conference. Doesn’t sound like a big deal really. But it provides enormous scope for sitting with uncertainty, exploring and taking some risks, and treading that uncertain terrain of outcomes versus experience. It’ll be a roller-coaster of a journey and one I’m looking forward to.

And here’s what I’ve seen as a symptom of this need for certainty – the inability to make a decision. So wary are we of making the ‘wrong’ decision, we make no decisions at all. Even small decisions. It means we remain in a holding pattern of uncertainty. So instead of finding the uncertainty something to inspire us, we wallow in it. A farmer once described to me his philosophy around decision making – at a time when his decisions could be the difference between being in business or looking for a new job. He called it ‘no regrets decision making’. Nice.

BTW, Barry Schwartz has spoken about the paradox of choice in this TED talk. Well worth a look.