Removing Barriers to Collaboration
How excited would you be about sitting down to dinner when every night you sat down to the same dish of luke warm green peas? Doesn’t sound all that appealing does it. If you were the chef, would you expect people to be very interested in even showing up for your meals, much less being [...]
When I first started facilitating and training, I thought I needed to have it all together up there in front of the room. I thought that I was supposed to know what to do in any circumstance and if the group got stuck and looked to me for answers, I thought I was supposed to [...]
Despite the myopic values portrayed on the Apprentice TV Series, I like watching how the teams work, or more often, don’t work together! During one show, I was appalled at how these very successful people could be so clueless about how to manage talent and in particular, how to facilitate the creative process in groups. [...]
We often tend to get in our own way when it comes to collaborating and building synergy with others. The term synergy, by the way refers to the possibility of a group being far more creative and effective than the sum of individuals that make it up. Many of the assumptions, attitudes, and habits that [...]
Allopathic: The Western Medical model in use today, is based upon the concept that the physician is responsible for the healing, and that “disease” must be eradicated from the body using heroic intervention. I chose to use this term to describe an issue that often befalls us in our efforts to facilitate organizational interventions. We’re [...]
Facilitating processes for others means facilitating your process too. Facilitators spend a lot of time preparing material and frameworks for setting up and running effective group processes. They may assemble resources relevant to the focus of their group. They attempt to anticipate some of the problems, concerns, and challenges that may present themselves so that they’ll [...]
When you put your knowledge in a circle, it’s not yours anymore, it’s shared by everyone. –Douglas Cardinal, Architect– The term “Talking Circle” comes to us from the Native American tradition and is again finding broad appeal in contemporary culture. Talking circles are being used by facilitators of personal and spiritual growth, grade school teachers, [...]
The One Word Story is an experiential activity that can be debriefed to illustrate the importance of ground rules or basic teamwork skills. This activity can easily be done virtually as well as face to face. Also note that the activity contains guildlines for each stage of the Kolb Learning Cycle. Activity: One Word Story—Ground rules/teamwork [...]
We’ve heard a lot in the business world about the importance of good leadership, attributes of a good leader, the importance of being a (fill in the blank) type of leader, etc. But we’ve not heard much about the attributes and importance of good followership. Since by definition there will always be more followers than [...]
How often have you been asked, What is Facilitation? This is an important question to be able to answer in a simple fashion. This is especially true when you’re being asked by a prospective client. And since just about everyone could use help with their groups and work teams, nearly everyone is a prospect! I’ve collected [...]
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