Blog
Improvising Recipes for Success
Many facilitators find it helpful to think in terms of Structures and their concomitant Freedoms, especially when they are designing and running activities that aim to engage their participants at appropriate levels of safety, risk and challenge.
If you’d like to explore improvising your organisation’s recipes for success, do please get in touch!
Is it your turn to go first? How to decide who starts in a pairs activity..
A recent post on the Applied Improvisation Network’s Facebook page asked for fun ways to determine who goes first in an activity.
The consensus was to aim for the sweet spot of innocuous enough not to cause offense, yet interesting enough to prompt a quick get-to-know-you..
When to take the nuclear option
Building enthusiasm and skills are vital components of any role. Our training provided to Sellafield employees was no exception if they were going to be able to better interact with visitors and provide an improved experience overall. Afterall, it seemed there was little else to do to pass the time on a rainy day in Cumbria…
How to bring the best of lockdown into your work
Many of us have fresh experiences of working from home. While #WFH will remain a trendy hashtag for a long time yet, some of us will be making the journey back to shared offices. Wouldn’t it be great if we could merge the best elements from our domestic professional arrangements with the most valuable aspects of being face-to-face?
How multiplying your communication channels will get you the results you need
When we are not face-to-face with each other in real rooms, we can lose people’s attention very easily.
Participants drift away mentally and who knows what happens when the camera is turned off? There are some really simple ways to engage and sustain people’s attention on a topic…
Participants resisting your training activities? It could be the size of the steps
One of my colleagues was preparing to facilitate a corporate event for 200 or so people in a conference room, and she was worried. She wanted to lead them through a physical activity in random pairs, in which the partners would alternate a count to 3. It’s a classic improvisational warm-up activity designed to generate connection…
Three steps to banishing apathy and replacing it with rich and useful feedback
Your team has been working hard in a difficult and novel working environment, and you’d like to reward them for their efforts. In your next online team meeting you want to involve them in deciding on a treat.
You ask them for ideas, but it’s a struggle to get them to put forward suggestions..
How to banish ‘Zoom Fatigue’ and bring energy back to your meetings
We’re told that people are getting ‘Zoom Fatigue’, which results in meetings that lack energy and get too little accomplished. If you’re struggling to get what you need from your virtual meetings, it’s useful to know that a well-structured design can deliver results and leave people wanting to come back.
How to juggle content and processes, without getting overwhelmed
As a facilitator, your attention is dragged in at least three different directions – towards the content, the process and the people.
It’s your responsibility to look after all these dimensions. But, for a whole range of reasons, there are times when your participants are no longer on-board..
How can we transform meetings from deadly dull to valuable and vibrant?
Too many face-to-face meetings, workshops and conferences are bitterly disappointing. Poorly structured, ineptly hosted and devoid of energy or results, they leave you wondering why the event took place at all. Since the arrival of Covid, the same is true of online events..
A good way to finish an online call – Virtual Facilitation #10
What’s a good way to finish an online call and ensure that you end with a continued (or increased) sense of engagement, and bring a feeling of completion? This is my adaptation of an activity I learned at a recent gathering of Oxford University alumni. “We’re all familiar with emojis? Yes!”
Why turn-taking is so important online – Virtual Facilitation #9
Turn-taking is a prominent part of a meeting, whether off-line or online. When we used to meet face to face in the same rooms with each other, we all knew whose turn it was. It was always the turn of the next most confident or senior speaker – unless the meeting was facilitated to allow others to step in first..
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