Project Lessons Learned - How To Reflect and Learn In An One Hour Session You run a project and at one moment in time, you figure out you could have learned from some situations and act differently next time. How about doing a "Lessons Learned" session either in the middle of the project or at the end? It was last year when I was asked to come up with a short session where one team could reflect upon their learnings during their project. The request was to be able to run in ONE HOUR. Wow, I said, this is really hard! I usually need sessions of a minimum of 1,5 hours to be able to run a session similar to a retrospective. And now one hour? I was thinking of having some kind of Mentimeter word cloud, to ‘read the room’ fast so I created one in Miro or with sticky notes in person. Then I went through the reflection part, decided, and committed. It went super cool in one hour and the participants were so amazed at how much they could do in this time. Afterwards, I was iterating on it in person, online and this initial version was the best one. This is why I decided to share it after trying it out with other teams as well. Here you can find the exact steps in Miroverse: https://miro.com/miroverse/project-lessons-learned-template/ I used the amazing learning cards from Strategyzer which work smoothly every time with the participants and have a great impact! If you like it, give it some love in Miroverse please :) ❤️ Let me know if you use it and how it works for you :)

hey everyone! I will facilitate a two day workshop with a leadership team (9 people) where they will decide on - The 3 year goal for the organisation - What initiatives to invest in that are aligned with the goal? - How to best structure the org in order to deliver these initiatives? The size of the engineering organization is around 140 engineers. The third bullet point above will include questions such as: - Does the current team structure still make sense - Should we merge currently separate teams (i.e. operations) with the engineering teams - Do the teams have the right skills needed for the new initiatives or do we need to move team members around I'm thinking about using the meddlers game from management 3.0 in order to guide the reorg discussion and visualize the potential new team structure. I've never done this before, so I'm open to any other suggestions from the community. Does anyone of you have experience in facilitating a reorg discussion? Any cool activities you would suggest? Thanks! Toby

Hi everyone. I’m new to this community, but I am absolutely loving everything AJ, smart. I’m hoping to enlist your advice. I’m running a two hour workshop next week on the topic of silos with an executive team within my organization. They will have already had a 90 minute discussion on work styles profiles right before the session with another facilitator. I don’t think they need an icebreaker. With that said, I’m looking for a strong start to kick off the session. The goals of the session are to explore different dimensions of silos (communication, behavior/mindset, systems, etc.) and to get clarity on what they wanna do about it. I’m doing some small group, reflective discussions for goal 1 and facilitated conversation with smaller breakouts for goal 2. I am planning to debrief using the goal 2 discussion using the effort impact matrix at the end. It’s a lot to cover in two hours so that’s another issue. Any advice or feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you. Jennie

Hello Facilitators👋 I'm really curious about where everyone is from. I'd love to make this a mega post where we can see how diverse the Facilitator Club community is. Who knows, you might find a lot more people in your area than you thought! Once I have lots of answers on this post, I want to make a nice graph!

Hi all, I have to facilitate a learning event as part of my L&D qualification. My chosen topic is difficult conversations. The purpose of the session is to inform participants on how to approach tricky conversations and the steps and principles involved. The goal is to walk away with a useful toolkit, some new knowledge and the belief that participants can manage difficult conversations with confidence. I have about 60-90 minutes and only 3 participants! Does anyone have any exercise ideas? Many thanks

I read the book “From Contempt To Curiosity - Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling” by Caitlin Walker and I had some takeaways that I apply already in my sessions about it here. How clean language can help teams bond through metaphors and specific questions? Which questions would help a team reflect upon their values and how to work together as ONE TEAM? In many cases, teams are formed and they are supposed to work together with the best performance and produce fast results. How could they do this if they do not take the time to reflect upon their values, ways of collaborating, and what kind of work fits them as one team? One of my preferred ways to help a team become a TEAM is to guide them in finding their values. In this way, they avoid starting point conflicts and broken collaboration. I use powerful questions and Playmobil Pro in situations that fit the team. Here are some questions inspired by Caitlin Walker’s book that are helpful for this and help reflection through metaphors: - “What could be a model or metaphor that encapsulates all the things that are most important to you as individuals in a team?” - “When you’re working at your best, you’re like what?” - “An ideal team for you, that would support you to work at your best, would be like what?” An example when I used a metaphor to create a safe environment for a teambuilding: I did not know back then that it was clean language, but I knew it was a reflection based on a metaphor. I was co-facilitating a team building and the starting point of that afternoon was an invitation to the participants to complete the sentence “Our Team Is Like…” The idea was that the participants would find their pair through a little game, and then take some moments to think and share the end of that sentence and why with each other.

Hy, I have to do a workshop for small groups of 5 participants. The goals of the exercise is to emphasize that every one in the company is important. We can not function if one role is out. Does anyone has a good exercise? Duration of workshop = 30 min

Hey everyone! I’ve got a 2 hour workshop on tomorrow, and this morning I woke up feeling rotten! I still want to run the workshop and I don’t feel sick enough to cancel - what are your tips for dosing up / mustering the energy to still give a great workshop when you’re battling with tiredness or sickness?

One of the great things about what we do is you can do it as an employee or go out and become your own company. Whilst the later comes with amazing benefits there are a lot of areas that need to be considers… Like - What does it take to set myself up as a business or do I just contract in. - If I am setting myself up as a business am I a sole trader.. registering by business - Defining your purpose and setting clear goals yearly, quarterly - Defining your target customers, products, services and financials. Whilst this is a passion space for a lot of us, you still need to understand your revenue needs. - Branding and marketing - What do you need to set yourself up… physically, technology - Contracts for engagements - How to build a pipeline, managing you customer base Making sure you get work life balance! Would be interested in hearing and learning from each other on what made sense for you and what you would like to share with the rest of the community…

Hi guys, I have heard about clean language in one of the podcast episodes of Nathy Ravez where she had as a guest Charles-Louis de Maare, whom I know from the visualization training I did with him. I was curious to find out more so I read the book “From Contempt To Curiosity - Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling” by Caitlin Walker. I find this method very useful in different settings, either in getting all perspectives in a room where people need to be heard, or in coaching sessions, it is very versatile and has been used for many years in various areas. So I will share here my notes from it and next week I will share more about how you can use it for teams. What does clean language mean? Clean language is about asking questions without projecting the other person's answer. It is about accepting and extending what has been said. You know these situations where you would like to reappraise for example using repositioning reappraisal and you seem not to get the other person's perspective? There is a good situation where clean language can support well. The idea is to respect the other person's opinion even if it does not make sense to you and ask questions until you get their perspective. Clean language helps to do this in a fast way, using a few questions. What would a clean language conversation look like? There are several questions to be asked and the main idea is to relate to what the other persons just said in order to build the next question on it. Here is an example of which questions can be asked: Example of dialogues extracted from the book: “A: What would you like to have happened?” Guy: I would like to get more in touch with my feelings so that I can write better songs about them.

Has anyone successfully sold a pretotyping package? I just almost hooked a massive client, but their budget isn't ready until January. I'm trying to get in a win in the next 6 weeks. I'd love to hear of any success stories and learn from you superstars out there. Happy to be an open book on my own efforts/strategy/pricing.

Hi! I just accepted a new position at Kraft Heinz as a Platform Innovation Lead! I want to do a kickoff with the team to get them excited about innovation. This is a research and development group and I want to do something fun. Would love all ideas!

Hi all, Does anyone have ideas for a good workshop we can run for a team that would like to develop their ability to have constructive conflicts and disagreements? I am thinknig some trust building exercise should precede this activity in order to be truly effective. Thanks!

Dear All, I was wondering if anyone has examples of Presenter slides for running a workshop. I am looking for inspiration on how you present the following visually in there: - Introduction to get the workshop off to a good start - Schedule of the workshop - Parking Lot and how it works - Different Ice Breakers and how they work - Final Words to wrap up the workshop I am looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards, Sebastian

Something that I enjoy doing, and perhaps uniquely so, is story writing. Possibly born from Safe 4.0 training as a way for me to communicate process in a way that resonated between the doers (who want to write “gimme a button there” and get their bonus by doing 100s of those) and the dreamers (who want to conquer the ever changing landscape of their industry faster than everyone else). Listening to the free call today (Thanks Tim!) i am taking the call to action to post my question about detailed story writing of the format: AS a [role] I want/need/should have [a thing built] SO THAT I CAN [complete a goal] WHICH WILL ALLOW US TO [manifest the dreamers dream] The idea of the opening of the facilitation I am selling is to create alignment of roles, things, goals, and dreams by having the participants write stories in the morning that generate note and vote how might we discussions as calibration and communication with active listening as I guide them to and through their needs and wants and blockages. Could have posted and may also in workshoper master and may also, but was going to ask “Does anyone else plan or use story writing as a tool in their design sprint work and what other exercises are good for galvanizing what comes out of that activity?” Thanks in advance for the answers and as a fun example -> as a future successful workshopper I want to get feedback about my idea to use stories so that I can work on my business plan which will allow me to show up and advertise my one thing and get clients :)