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!

Sometimes when people hear the word 'icebreaker' they cringe or might feel super anxious about taking part in one. Yes, icebreakers can make you feel a bit awkward initially, but they are proven to help enhance relationships and encourage creativity. 'Icebreakers can help increase team bonds, boost performance and creativity'—Harvard Business School study Integrating icebreakers into your workshops or meetings is a great way to get everyone relaxed and ready to participate. But how do you choose the right ones so that you avoid those dreaded awkward silences? Here are my Top 2 Icebreakers that are easy to implement (in-person or online): 1. My First Job Ask everyone in the group to write down their name, their first job, and what they learned from that job. Then go round the group and have everybody read theirs out. 2. Pointless Questions Prepare a few fun questions ahead of the workshop, then go round the room and have everybody take turns answering the questions. It’s as simple as that—you don’t even need to write anything down! Here are some question suggestions to get you started: - If you could invite a celebrity over for dinner, who would it be and why? - What is your most prized possession and why? - You can have an unlimited supply of one thing for the rest of your life. What do you choose? Here are some more icebreakers for you to explore! What's another great icebreaker that I can add to my list?

Hey! This may relate more to the firms rather than individuals who work independently even though I think the continuous demand of allocating new clients applies for everyone. - What are your approaches towards finding and communicating with prospects? - Which one would you consider as more effective approach between 'digital' and 'in-person'? - Do you use any platforms like UpSales or similar? Are they helpful? - Would you hire an external resource or you want to do in-house marketing? Why? Since we have a diverse group of people here, I am also interested to see how this may differ in different countries/regions so don't be shy please! :)

One of the toughest skills to learn as a workshop facilitator is managing circular discussions. I'm talking about those discussions where where the team goes around in circles discussing the same topic multiple times. Here’s my top tips on how to handle circular discussions: - Time-boxing - let the group know that you’re going to set a timer for this discussion, the time-pressure will help people be more concise in their thoughts. - Note taking - Listen to the discussion and add notes to your whiteboard. Visualising a discussion will help the team recognise when they’re repeating themselves. - Addressing repetition - Tell the team when they’re repeating themselves, highlight the notes on the board that cover what they’re saying and ask them (politely) to move on. - Challenge relevance - Circular discussions have a tendency to get off track, if you feel like what’s being discussed isn’t relevant to the topic at hand, highlight it with the team. - Summarising - Once you feel like enough has been said, interject with a summary, ask the group if you’ve missed anything and if not, move on. - Deciding - If the discussion needs a decision to move forward, summarise and then ask your decider to decide what you should move forward with. - Parking lot - If a discussion is stretching on too long, and its not crucial to resolve it for the purpose of your workshop, add a post-it to your parking lot and return the discussion later if you have time What are you top tips for managing discussions in a workshop?

Hey! Thanks for the initiation for a structured club of facilitators. <3 A frustrating question asked by most of the first-time clients is "Why should we hire an external facilitator?" Even though I have been dealing with this question in my own way, it's eye opening to see how others are doing. Cheers!

Hello Facilitators!👋 We are so EXCITED to announce that we’ll be hosting a virtual meet-up next Thursday, March 9th at 7PM CET. This is the perfect opportunity for us all to come together, get to know one another and chat about Facilitation and Workshopping in a super casual way! The purpose of this call is for you to meet and learn from other community members in a friendly, open, and relatively unstructured format! This call won’t have a ‘theme,’ but we will draw from conversations happening within the community. As the format is so unstructured, if you’d like to discuss any successes or challenges you’re experiencing in the world of facilitation and workshopping, this is the space to share. We want to make this community as unique as possible and make genuine connections with you so we can all grow and learn together as Facilitators so meeting virtually is a great step in the right direction! If you’re interested in joining, here's the link to this call. The link to join is also in the Skool calendar 🤗 Hope to see many of you at this call. I'm SUPER excited to meet you all 💛

So, here is the story about how I created an intro video without actually creating a video using free AI tools available on the net. I asked ChatGPT to write a video script based on an article in my blog. Technically I copy/pasted the article and gave specific instructions about what is the purpose and how do I want it. Then I asked it to adjust the script for a video below 1 minute. With a little bit of back and forth communication, we agreed what to keep and what to remove! Next, I used Colossyan as a text to speech tool. It even creates a speaking persona but I preferred to keep the audio since the character doesn't look so natural. (I believe it will soon enough!) Finally, I took the script to Lumen and asked it to create a video while I added the audio instead of the background music. And boom! Here is the result so what ya'll think?

I am thinking of putting a workshop together for Experiment Design. Say the team has one or some hypothesis and they want to find out which experiment is the most appropriate one to test it? What is the data to be collected and why? How is it going to be used in evaluating the hypothesis? ... Overall, the purpose of the workshop is to design an optimized and efficient instructions package for experimenting the hypothesis. Has anyone ever done this or similar workshop for the same purpose? I would appreciate if you share your experience. 🙏

The company I currently work for struggles with filling their Innovation Funnel. There is no structure/system in place to gather new ideas, to prioritize & select, etc etc... 😫 This way we of course run into some 'less ideal projects' now. So, if you can share some tips to set this up (do's/don'ts), please do... 🙏 Or if you could point towards some frameworks to use or have other useful things to help, don't hesitate 🤗

I've been playing a lot with ChatGPT in the context of facilitation. Check the overall conversation by opening the images in this post one by one! This stuff is mind-blowing!!!!! Some conclusions: ✅ ChatGPT is wonderful for inspiration! Think of it as a co-facilitator ✅ You need to know what to ask! Problem framing and critical thinking are skills even more valuable in the age of AI ✅ The robot wont run the workshop for you ;) So the whole human element and real-time ability to adapt give facilitators even more value! ✅ I cannot wait to see the amazing abilities AI will give facilitators. One example is to use AI tools to quickly capture visually some exercises outputs without the need to be a great scribbler/sketch-noter. You can try it out at chat.openai.com :) How about you? What experiments have you been doing with AI and facilitation?

I have an exciting idea 💡 about creating an active facilitation meetup community where we create physical local events so we can bring forward to more people the power and benefits of workshops. Anyone interested? Send me a private message so we can talk and I can tell you more.