Making the Most of Facilitate Better Content (Facilitation Friday #1)
Five tips and a worksheet to help you maximize the value of forthcoming essays
Facilitate Better’s 52 Weeks to More Effective Facilitation begins now!
I hope my weekly essays provide you with useful information to help you:
facilitate meetings that produce better discussions, decisions, and results; and
design and facilitate workshops, conferences, and other learning experiences that accelerate learning and community.
January and February essays focus on foundational principles intended to inform your mindset and judgment for all of your facilitation efforts. Subsequent posts explore more specific facilitation practices and dynamics, as well as useful tools, techniques, and formats. The posts aren’t necessarily sequential so feel free to skip around as desired.
Before we leave the starting blocks, let me offer you five tips on how to make the most of the weekly Friday posts you’ll receive. Use the Learning Journal linked below to capture the information asked for by some of the tips and for your notes overall.
Tip #1: Specify desired contexts for your facilitation learning.
Nothing is wrong with wanting to generally just get better at facilitation. But each essay likely will have more impact toward this broader goal if you connect and apply it to specific contexts. I suggest identifying a few key answers to this question and recording them in the your Learning Journal (page one).
In what settings and/or with what people do I most want to engage in a more effective and facilitative manner?
Reconnect to your responses as you read each essay and consider how the content can be used in the settings you specified or with the individuals you noted.
Tip #2: Focus on implications and applications.
While each essay offers some possible implications (so what?) and applications (now what?) in each essay, only you can connect the content to your specific contexts.
As you read, think about what might this mean for your and your efforts and when, how, and/or with whom you might want to apply your takeaways. Your Learning Journal provides space to capture this information and you can duplicate pages as needed.
Tip #3: Try on new beliefs, behaviors, tools, and techniques to see how they fit.
Periodically pick a meeting or a workshop and focus on implementing one of the takeaways you’ve noted. Reflect on how this new behavior, belief, principle, or practice felt as you applied it. How might you tailor your use of it in the future for a better and more customized fit?
Experiment with different tools and techniques. After doing so, think about how you might refine your efforts so they work even better in the future. Identify with what content or in what contexts you might best leverage a particular format or approach.
Tip #4: Give away your takeaways.
People often capture takeaways when reading an article, listening to a podcast, or participating in a workshop.
You can immediately increase the value of these takeaways by turning them into giveaways, identifying others who would value the takeaway and then appropriately sharing it with them. Think of yourself as a “Learning Ambassador” for your friends and colleagues.
I hope you’ll also utilize each post’s share button and forward relevant essays to others who may find the content of interest, particularly via your social networks. Remember, all content is free!
Want to reprint or repurpose any of my content? Please contact me directly to discuss the nominal licensing fee to do so. I’m also happy to discuss modifying individual essays for specific audiences and publications and regularly do so.
Tip #5: Join with one or more colleagues for this journey.
I find it easier to make sense of content when I discuss it with others. Consider forming a small community of practice (with members of your organization and/or external colleagues or friends) that periodically convenes to talk about individual essays, your reactions to them, and how have (or will) put the info to use.
And while many value an ongoing CoP, don’t feel pressured to form a group that works through every post. I often share a specific article or podcast with a few friends or colleagues on an ad hoc basis and then convene us for a conversation.
I’m excited to embark on this learning journey with you and welcome your feedback and questions about individual essays or my efforts in general. Simply message me as a reply to any post you receive or use this contact form.
© Facilitate Better and Jeffrey Cufaude. All rights reserved.