Due to the success of the first-ever Fantastic Facilitation workshop held recently in Melbourne, this week in Sydney there's another workshop on offer.
Major workshop topics include:
• What is facilitation?
• Your role as facilitator
• Encouraging feedback and dialogue
• Motivational factors and keeping the end in mind
• Relating to the people while sticking to the process
• Shifting focus: big picture and next actions steps
• Putting it all together: Fantastic Facilitation!
Gain some great takeaway tips such as: dealing with problem participants, improv techniques, how to get things moving and successful facilitation language.
Feedback from last month's Melbourne session
"Thought-provoking day packed with useful insights and practical know-how" Linda Johnson, Communications Manager - Nestle
"Great. Loved it and will let my team know how much it will benefit them" Jay Shaw, Project Officer (Change) - Department of Human Services
"Great to hear that others are facing the same issues. Some of the experiences and ideas shared will be really useful in providing options and solutions for issues I am currently facing at work" David Kavanagh, Senior Officer Internal Communications - Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
"Very much enjoyed Todd’s ‘style’ – the type of ‘natural’ facilitation style I aspire to" Julie Tassone, Communications & Alliance Health Manager - JHG
Interested? Here's how to register
1. Register online
2. E-mail
3. Ring Melcrum directly: +61 2 9222 2810
People often say that they enjoy my use of humour (mind you, some folks also ask if I've done work on radio because they like my voice and I kinda wonder if what they really mean is that I have a "face for radio"). Catching up my talented and funny Australian friend Kay Ross (@kayross) here in Hong Kong yesterday, I was reminded again how important humour and improvisation are in all areas of work and life.
I like Tim Gard's view of how humour relates to human behaviour. He suggests you use humour to "refresh and renew yourself" - that you should use humour first for yourself and that will put you in a better state of mind to share it with other people. Now you need to be a bit gentle with yourself (no biting sarcasm thanks!) and to "laugh not with ridicule, but with objectivity and acceptance of self".
In other words, learn to be responsive, not reactive when faced with difficult situations. Find a way to laugh at the stuff that pushes your buttons and life gets a whole lot easier...and funner...and funnier!
As Tim notes, it's the difference between seeing funny thing and seeing things funny. Look for the humour in situations with a lighthearted attitude and stop taking yourself (and the world) so seriously.
So...what can you do to try it out today? You can change your mood, your perception and your state of mind while having some fun at the same time!
Hear more of Tim's insights in this short interview by my friend and colleague Tara Diversi (@taradiversi).
4) Being in control – having a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness
5) Blending egos – working collaboratively not competitively
6) Equal participation, informed by comparable skill levels
7) Familiarity with performance styles of other group members
8) Communication that’s spontaneous and ongoing (i.e. café/lunchroom talks)
9) Use “Yes, and…” thinking to accept offers and extend and build on them
10) The potential for failure and the value of rehearsals
And in answer to the question, “what is the best balance of planning and improvisation?” Sawyer devotes a chapter to “Organizing for Improvisation,” where he offers another top-ten list of the secrets of collaborative organizations:
1) Keep many irons in the fire – innovative companies experiment with lots of low-cost projects on the go, responding to what emerges
2) Create a Department of Surprise – look for ways to repurpose apparently failed experiments by finding them a home elsewhere in the organization
3) Build space for creative conversation – more on this below
4) Allow time for ideas to emerge – deadlines amp up stress and kill creativity; you can’t rush creativity because it needs incubation time
5) Manage the risks of improvisation – define the right amount of time taken away from other projects, the sheer number of ideas generated and balance with the need for structure and planning
6) Improvise at the edge of chaos – not too rigid to prevent creative emergence, not too loose as to results in complete chaos
7) Manage knowledge for innovation – capture the innovations that emerge improvisationally and make sure other parts of the organization can benefit from the creative sparks
8) Build dense networks – keep groups small enough to effectively interact, ca. 150-200 people (the size of the earliest human societies, and still the ideal size of group to effectively manage changes, including those required in creative processes)
9) Ditch the org chart – break down the silos and get people working across business units to cross-pollinate ideas and discover latent creative forces
10) Measure the right things – instead of spend on R&D or number of patents registered, measure the health of your social networks in the organization to find out just how well people are interacting and how well information is diffused.
I would flesh out a couple of these points in particular as follows. On point #3 (building space for creative conversation), it’s absolutely crucial if you expect people to be creative that you give them an environment that says to the brain: “it’s OK to be creative here”. As an example, Google got this right in their Zurich office design. As the waggish final slide suggests, creativity rarely emerges from cubicle farms.
One other idea that I think is worth highlighting from the list is a combination of points 2, 7, 8, 9 and 10 – the concept that innovative solutions created in one part of an organization can have unexpected and novel applications in other areas to solve problems that would otherwise go unsolved. To put it in a wider context: When I interviewed the Dutch cross-cultural business thinker Fons Trompenaars he pointed out that a surprisingly large number of innovations come from other countries and only appear new because no one ever thought to view things quite that way before. One of the best examples I've seen lately of this kind of innovation came from author Dan Pink, who's understood the lesson well with his latest book, Johnny Bunko published in the manga format popularized in Japan, a first in the English-speaking world and a product perfectly pitched for a the meaning-hungry Gen-Y market:
In Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Keith Sawyer has woven together a range of disparate threads of thought into an enjoyable and practical book on the creative process. He’s debunked several myths regarding creativity and synthesized ideas from several different worlds in a way that left me thinking, “Yes, I recognize everything you’re saying and I’ve seen much of this before, but never so well organized and neatly presented in one place.”
The book has received many reviews since its publication last year and a twoawards as well so I won’t offer an overview. Instead I’d like to draw out one thread in particular that informs the majority of Sawyer’s book: the idea of improvisation.
First, some background. For some years I’ve been involved with the Applied Improvisation Network (AIN), whose aim is to “spread the transforming power of improvisation.” The AIN is a collaborative “community of practitioners and clients who value the use of improvisation skills in organizations to improve relationships, increase authenticity, promote spontaneity, foster trust and build communities of practice.”
Improv enthusiasts have every reason to be ecstatic over Sawyer’s book, since it echoes what they have been saying for years and lends to their arguments the triple weight of his academic research (professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, he took his Ph.D. in psychology studying creativity with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, originator of the concept of “Flow”) his practical business savvy (following his computer science degree at MIT he designed video games for Atari and then did management consulting on innovative technologies with Kenan Systems) and his artistic flair (he is himself an improviser as a jazz pianist for over 30 years, spending several of those years playing piano with Chicago improv theatre groups).
In contrast to the traditional notion of the “lone genius” being responsible for great creative breakthroughs, Sawyer’s thesis is that all creativity is actually collaborative and that improvisation is the ideal format for getting the creative juices flowing. To understand and promote successful collaboration, it pays to focus on the moment-to-moment interactional dynamics. Innovation emerges over time as team members practice deep listening, build on each others’ ideas, allow for emergent meaning creation, create room for surprising (and unanticipated) questions and allow the process the time and space it requires to unfold according to its own pace and flow.
In an organizational setting there is an clear need for structure and strategic planning. Yet he gives real-world examples to show that improvisation is often more responsive and effective than heavily scripted approaches. So what is the best balance of planning and improvisation? The answer (expanding on the concept coined by his former supervisor Csikszentmihalyi) is what he’s termed a state of Group Flow, enabled by 10 key conditions that he describes in the book.
OK this posting is a long one and I want to discuss more thoughts prompted by this book, so I’m going to extend this review over a few posts…and why not. For now it’s good night from Melbourne. TM
Due to the success of the first-ever Fantastic Facilitation workshop held recently in Melbourne, this week in Sydney there's another workshop on offer.
, here are the 10 factors that Sawyer suggests enable 
