Keeping it fresh
September 1, 2015
With lots of Creative Facilitation training under my belt, the challenge is to keep it fresh. The danger is complacency. Two things happened in today’s training that helped with the freshness. Actually, one happened even before I arrived. I’d decided I’d done enough preparation, so on the train to Melbourne, decided to read the paper […]
Read moreFacilitation and equilibrium
September 30, 2014
Some beliefs and theories in facilitation have always bothered me. What appears to be sane and sensible on paper, in reality, just simply don’t stack up when working with a real, live group of humans. One of these is divergent thinking and convergent thinking. It presumes that people will engage in divergent thinking (coming up […]
Read moreBringing a festival mindset to conferences
March 26, 2014
It seems that conferences are as popular as ever. Yet many of them are stuck in some kind of conference void, wherever any innovation or creativity is talked about rather than enacted. Why do gamification / improvisation / creativity conferences and events, mostly, not use the principles they espouse for others in their own event design? […]
Read moreWish I’d thought of that!
September 7, 2012
Doesn’t really matter what it is, when I see something I really like, a great idea, a new use for something, I invariably wish I’d thought of that. I do understand that most good ideas are crowd sourced, or group generated – Keith Sawyer did a great job in his book Group Genius in debunking […]
Read moreWhat change looks like
August 21, 2012
This TEDxHarlem talk by Jake Barton describes how we can move beyond the traditional (and mostly dysfunctional) public meeting and mobilise the community to be involved in creating a better future. As well as the messages about “re-imagining public participation” this talk highlights a few other things as well. Jake Barton uses story-telling to good […]
Read moreRe-learning how to learn from mistakes
June 8, 2012
Watch any young child learning something new. Generally, there’s lots of false starts. Surfing is a big industry around here. On any day, there’s groups of people learning to surf – young kids, teenagers, adults. There’s no short cut to learning to surf. There’s lots of false starts. Yet every time someone misses a wave, […]
Read moreMeetings or Meetups?
April 8, 2012
After September 11 in 2001 in New York strangers started saying hello to each other. There was a yearning for community, says Matt Meeker, co-founder of Meetup. Today meetup.com facilitates off-line group meetings on any imaginable topic, now in 101 countries. I’m new to Meetups. I participate in two Meetup Groups in Melbourne: The Creative Performance […]
Read moreExploring the edges of the way we work
August 4, 2011
I’ve started a little research project to explore the edges of how we work. When facilitating workshops with many different groups and organisations, there is sometimes a disconnect between what people want to do and how it is expected to be done. Approaches that were once just fine are now struggling in the face of […]
Read moreThe road to improvisation
December 23, 2010
I really liked this article about the improvisational brain, based on research of musical improvisation. A couple of things stood out: we learn words, then phrases and then grammar that eventually enables us to recombine them all to communicate our thoughts. That’s language. And we can learn notes, cords, and progressions that eventually enables us […]
Read moreTrying too hard
July 3, 2010
Sometimes I find myself trying too hard. Trying too hard to impress, or to keep the peace, or to come up with a brilliant idea. And this despite that I know that I can’t do all or any of those things even some, let alone all, of the time – and certainly not on demand. […]
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