If you put your participants into breakout rooms, you can’t expect great conversations online to break out automatically. They might, but equally might not. And this is an instance where you need to take even more care in an online world than when facilitating at a f-2-f conference or workshop event. In the latter, there’s…
This week a group of us re-watched, via a Facebook Watch Party, one of the most impactful talks ever given at an Applied Improvisation Network (AIN) Conference. It was Pablo Suarez speaking about adapting what we know (i.e. improvisation) to the field of disaster preparedness.
Pablo, from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, was with us to…
During a recent webinar on facilitation trends, I asked a group of practitioners for their tips on making space safer. Here are our top ten:
1. Articulate goals and expectations upfront and early, so everyone is clear about what we’re there to do.
2. To keep it constructive and relevant, ask ‘What needs to happen here today for it to be useful to you?’
If you are stuck with a problem or want to generate new ideas for a project, here’s a great activity to prompt fresh thinking. It’s also a handy way to banish writers’ block. Here’s what I wrote in a recent workshop, led by Trevor Day for the AMED Writers Group. Trevor provided a selection of objects for us on a table.
We all love behavioural economics, right? With their clever psychological experiments, counterintuitive insights and wonderful nudges, they throw fresh revelatory light onto our thinking and behaviour. Take for instance risk-aversion. The key insight in several of the books I’ve been perusing is that we tend to be risk-averse for gains…
How many of us have been part of a bad brainstorm? But what if it’s not about the group but about how ‘bursty’ it is? And how can improvisation create burstiness? Creativity comes in bursts. Well, that’s according to the Adam Grant podcast ‘WorkLife’, in which he visited Trevor Noah and ‘The Daily Show’…
