Are you organizing a workshop but you don't know where to start? 🤔Here are 7 steps to prepare your workshop : 1️⃣Define the workshop’s objectives 🎯 2️⃣Identify customers’ expectations 🔍 3️⃣Pick the right team 💪 4️⃣Plan the workshop agenda📔 5️⃣ Create the workshop content 🟨 6️⃣Communicate to manage expectations 💬 7️⃣ Set-up the workshop experience While it's rare that a workshop will fully stick to the plan you prepared, the value of preparation lies in the deeper connection you develop with the topic, the ability to consider different angles, and ultimately be more ready for whatever comes your way. And you guys, how do you prepare for your workshops ? 🤔

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!

I often have the opportunity to facilitate community events, workshops, and training, but feel I am just "ok" at it and sometimes struggle with certain bits. I don't know how I stumbled across AJ&Smart (probably googling my way through a workshop design....), but I'm so happy I did! Looking forward to learning from this community!

Lately, I've been mulling over different analogies to illustrate the Facilitator's role, particularly in the context of managing group dynamics. Here's an interesting one that struck me: Think of a group of people like a bustling city intersection. There are many different paths crossing each other, each with their own direction and speed. In this situation, it's easy for things to get chaotic or for some paths to get overshadowed by others. This is exactly what happens when people come together - there's a multitude of thoughts, ideas, and perspectives intersecting. People might have different viewpoints, some ideas might get side-lined, and quieter individuals might not get a chance to express their thoughts. It's like the louder cars drowning out the quieter ones or some paths being blocked by others. This is where a Facilitator steps in, acting like a traffic controller at this intersection. They ensure that each 'car' or person gets a fair chance to move forward, making sure everyone's ideas and voices are heard. They guide the 'traffic', or the conversation, to ensure that the team's discussions are effective and aimed towards achieving their goals. So, just like a traffic controller is crucial for smooth and fair traffic movement, a Facilitator is key to productive, inclusive, and goal-oriented group discussions. What do think of this analogy? I'd love to hear your own analogies or metaphors of the Facilitator's role in the comments!

I am asked to design a 3-hour workshop, which I will not facilitate myself, but which will be run by the client. The director of an NGO wants to review the current mission statement and brand positioning with her core team. And from this, formulate the identity of the organisation. (As a basis for a later workshop with the whole team on the values of the organisation). – The whole thing is very short-term. I have to present the workshop concept on Monday. So I am grateful for all your ideas so that I can work on the design over the weekend. THANK YOU!

I prompted this question in an intro call for another facilitation course and I got interestiing answers. Mine would be, that people as well as me are feeling energized after a day despie a fatigue and after they will tell me the talk of town often referred to a workshop and its outcome. 🗺️ Impact Mapping would be a factual tool to do so, but more from a gut perspective I love exploring this question. ⭕️ Another answer was "When they don't mention my name in the feedback round..." which for this facilitator was a sign of deeply ignited team dynamics – to her own professional satisfaction. So I am curios now, whats your clear signs and feeling or metrics, that it worked?

Hi everyone, Hope everything is going well. This is Joshe Ordonez from Ecuador. We are currently looking for a Freelance Facilitator to help us moderate a few business meetings throughout the year. We are a team of 9 people, we are all native Spanish speakers but we speak English as well. We are looking for someone that is also fluent in Spanish just in case. For context, our company Airpals is a B2B platform that helps teams to book and coordinate same-day local courier services. If anyone is interested, please get in touch with your project or hourly rates. joshe@airpals.co (not com) Thank you in advance for your consideration.

The goal of all kind of workshops is straightforward: generate, decide, prioritize and test challenges, ideas and concepts all within a time limit and with a clear set of rules ("No talking"!). This is to be efficiënt as possible. But what if there is a need to discuss certain ideas or concepts or maybe share some ideas or concepts to jumpstart some more timid workshop participants? Do you incorporate some discussion within a workshop exercise (at a certain step) or do you close off a workshop with a open conversation about the ideas/concepts discussed within that workshop?🤔 Or do you just completely hate discussing and wasting time doing so during workshops? 😃 That might be possible.

Hey Legends! When I'm designing a workshop or program I've got a huge amount of activities that fall under different topics that I could pull into a workshop and use. Probably like most people here. Right now I just keep them haphazardly in google docs, as part of course outlines etc. I thought of a new activity this morning that doesn't have a natural place and that got me thinking "surely there's a better way to manage this". So my question is - does anyone use miro, trello or something else to store/manage discreet activities that may be used across topics? Happy to provide an example if this doesn't make sense.

Hello 👋 Facilitators! I'm looking for help facilitating a one- or two-day workshop on the Jersey Shore for a group of 15-20 people on June 14-15th. This will be in-person, so I'm looking for someone in the area with general facilitator skills. Still working out the details, but if you're interested, let me know and we can chat about timing, content, etc. Thanks!

Hey fellow facilitators, I use Miro in my facilitation sessions - due to facilitating marketing and social media sessions - I often copy a lot of images into Miro. 😢 But organizing pictures in Miro is a pain. 🔍 But one hidden feature just got released that will change your life. 👍 Hit the like button if this was useful for you. Cheers Marc

Did you know that the average person spends 6 years of their life in meetings? That's a lot of time, so it's important to make sure that your meetings are effective and productive ! I've attended countless meetings and have seen my fair share of poorly designed agendas and meeting structures. It's frustrating to sit through a meeting that lacks direction or purpose, and it's a waste of everyone's time. That's why I'm sharing some tips on how to design effective agendas and meeting structures that will help you and your team achieve your goals. 1. Start with a clear objective: Before you even begin to design your agenda, you need to have a clear objective in mind. What is the purpose of the meeting? What do you hope to achieve? Having a clear objective will help you stay focused and ensure that everyone is on the same page. 2. Prioritize your agenda items: Once you have your objective in mind, it's time to prioritize your agenda items. Start with the most important items and work your way down. This will help you stay on track and ensure that you cover all the necessary topics. 3. Include time limits: Time is a precious commodity, and meetings can quickly spiral out of control if there are no time limits in place. Include time limits for each agenda item to ensure that you stay on track and don't run over time. 4. Assign roles: Assigning roles to each team member can help ensure that everyone is engaged and contributing to the meeting. Assign someone to take notes, someone to keep track of time, and someone to facilitate the discussion. 5. Use visuals: Visual aids can be a great way to keep everyone engaged and on track. Use slides, charts, or diagrams to help illustrate your points and keep the discussion focused. 6. Follow up: After the meeting, make sure to follow up with everyone to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that action items are being completed. This will help ensure that the meeting was effective and that progress is being made. Let me know your thoughts 🤗

I recently consulted a client who wanted to do better client workshops. To my surprise, they didn't use any rules to guideline that collaborative dynamics – which I think is absolutely key to avoiding loads of trouble. Also, I tend rather to call them --> GUIDELINES or --> RECOMMENDATIONS, because certain terms are more or subtle resistance triggers. I would love to know from you, hence use this as a sharing thread: + WHAT RULE SET DO YOU USE? + How participants integrate them? + How do you get them to comply? + How often have you to remind them/pointing the finger back to the rule set? PS.: Here are some of my favourites, pretty Design Thinking inspired: FlightMode / Fun is not the enemy of Work / Ask! / Hands-Up-Moderation / Done is better than perfect / CircleWork / One Conversation At The Time / No criticism without better suggestions / Work Visual / Coach Control (the force to feedback me instantaneaously, if I lost the track) / Built Up On Ideas Of Others / Communicate Your Needs / Headline Style On PostIts /...

Hey there! 👋 Facilitator Club is THE community for Facilitators or those who want to learn the skill of facilitation, where you can… ✅ Talk about facilitation and workshops (like the Design Sprint!) ✅ Talk about facilitation careers and how to build one (and make $$$ as a Facilitator!) ✅ Share workshop/facilitation insights, experiences, and resources ✅ Ask the AJ&Smart team questions about facilitation & workshops! This document contains important information about getting the most out of this community, so please read through everything before you get started! 👇👇👇 💃 How to get the most out of the Facilitator Club community 🕺 Really happy to have you here, hope you love the community as much as we do! Lots of love, The AJ&Smart team 💛

Fun video with a little cameo by Jonathan 🤣

It's great to be here

Aim The workshop’s HMW-challenge. Possibility to add a higher aim with the HMW-challenge distilled from a previous workshop. Background The top voted problems from collection phase (two or more votes). Limitations High impact/high effort solutions. Optional to add but documents an awareness of other solutions that this project won’t include because it’s too much effort. Goals and corresponding project goals Success criteria (the goals) and corresponding high impact/low effort solutions (project goals) from commitment phase with List of activities The three steps to try each high impact/low effort solution. Monitoring and evaluation The activity board that defines what (high impact/low effort solutions), who and when. Whoever is tasked with writing up the project plan suggests on when and how the entire project is evaluated, perhaps with another LDJ. Some context... Recently, I guided an executive team through two LDJs because they wanted to make progress in their strategic plan. While the workshop was an opportunity to force the team to commit to smaller tests, I anticipated that the complexity of the strategic plan will also require high effort solutions that they need to find a starting point for. To get the best of both, I decided to test to run the same LDJ-workshop twice. The first workshop had a broader challenge focused on the team’s strategic plan and generated low effort tests that they committed to. The top voted solution in the project-box on the action board became the starting challenge for the second workshop. The aim for the second workshop was to make progress on activities in the strategic plan that require high effort by breaking it down into a project plan the team could commit to. Two out of the team were tasked to write up the results of the workshop into a project plan template that I prepared for them. Using the framework of a project plan was beneficial in several ways: - The members are familiar with project management which made the workshop more relatable. - As a governmental department we must ensure our work is traceable. Thus, documentation is necessary where a project plan is a simple way to track work. The project plan also forces the team to formulate complete sentences to define their aims, problems, and goals.

Hi, I wanted to share some highlights I had yesterday. I co-facilitated a workshop called "Innovation day" with 21 persons as a full day. Even though they worked a lot and created a prioritized list of initiatives they will implement in the next 1,5 years and also created a storyboard for them with the steps they will follow and so on, they told me at 17:00 it is like 14:00 for them and they felt the day like a break. I was designing the day with my colleague filled up with games and mixed up with fun activities so they actually enjoy it and it feels like playing. It is fabulous feedback for me and wanted to share it here. @Rebecca Courtney in case of interest I offer to share the design and some highlights from the workshop, which may be useful for other persons as well. Below the poster created - I did the middle part before the workshop, then collected the thoughts of participants on sticky notes and after workshop, I clustered sticky notes and visualized them through drawing:)

Are you looking to make your upcoming off-site a resounding success but not sure about what to do and how to facilitate it? Look no further, because I've got you covered! 🎯💼 Allow me to clarify. When I use the term "team retreat," I refer to an opportunity to step away from the day-to-day work and focus on the big ideas surrounding your organization. It can also be known as an off-site or a team day—different names, same purpose. In the carrousel, I shared the three key ingredients for designing a successful retreat. Unlike a Design Sprint, there is no one-size-fits-all formula for retreats. I nstead, they should be tailored to the goals and needs of the teams you're working with. However, I believe that every great retreat should explore at least three aspects: 1️⃣ Team & Culture 👊: Improving team collaboration and culture by creating moments for the team to connect. 2️⃣ Strategy 🧠: Developing a pragmatic strategy to help teams reach their specific goals. 3️⃣Fun 🥳: Organizing activities to allow the team relax and have fun. Ready to add another type of workshop in your worksop portfolio ? 🚀

Anyone here experienced zoning out in the middle of a facilitation session? How do you bring yourself back and catch up if you're the one facilitating and are supposed to be the most focused person in the group?

Hey Facilitators! 👋 We’ve got something super exciting lined up for you! We’re hosting a live Q&A session with the fantastic @Nathy Ravez, who is not only a workshop facilitator and collaboration coach, but also a podcast host! Nathy’s life took a 180-degree turn when she chose to dive into the world of facilitation. She’s going to share her roller-coaster journey with us, and trust us, it’s a story you don’t want to miss! 👉 So, here’s the plan: 📅 When? Wednesday, May 24th at 12pm CEST. 🗺️ Where? LIVE on Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85414950665 This is a golden opportunity to glean insights, ask questions, and see how you can chart a similar course. Will I see you there?

Hey all, I posted a proposal to allow people in London (England) to meet up, network and chat a few weeks back. I've managed to secure a great spot adjacent and overlooking the Tower of London. The event is posted on Meetup and I'm in the process of posting it far and wide, Please feel free to help me get it out there! It'd be great to build some momentum here and my motivation is purely to get to know more expereinced facilitators. I'm trying to make a transistion from being an Army Officer (Gurkha Engineers) to the resl world and am passionate about this space. Link: https://www.meetup.com/london_innovation_network/events/293465328/ if you dont have access or want to create a meetup account, please message me and I'll add you. Where: Citizen M Tower Hill (Floor 7 then upto the mezzanine or balcony if the weather is good to enjoy the amazing view) When: 1830 - 2100 on Wed 24 May 22 and then monthly at same time. What: Informal Innovation and Facilitation chats and a little speed networking (20 mins). Future events may have a little more structure.....just need to work that out. I hope to see you there and look forward to meeting you. Dave

Hey Facilitators 👋 I'm compiling a list of the best resources for facilitators (free or paid) for potential future content, and I would like to ask you all if you have any recommendations. It could be books, materials, tools, blogs, podcasts, or communities. Any resources that you've come across that you find helpful as a Facilitator. I'd really appreciate your contributions to this post. Rebecca 💟

🚀 Hello sweet F-people! ❤️ I am so glad this club emerged. My name is Göran (go-run for English natives), and I got skilled in graphic design & copywriting, communication science, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, Relationship dynamics and DJing. Long time I was looking at what it is and realised facilitation amalgamates everything above into one excellent harbour. 🌍 I love connecting people, topics and goals, and my favourites are large group formats, which I ran for conference kick-offs, Design Thinking (and related topics), and Team Building and I even have a format called The Orgasm Workshop (ask me everything;)) for festivals and cruises. As an avid traveller I love challenging myself, working in different cultural contexts, and the latest formats I ran in Nairobi. 🎧 DJing for Ecstatic Dance and plant ceremonies taught me tons for the facilitation space, and I am happy to share... https://soundcloud.com/djgoranji 💬 Also, I added upfront of my formats the NARRATIVE ANALYSIS to craft much better and systemically inspired formats which became a game-changer for me. When you love to know what I do there, feel free to reach out. 📗 WHAT I WANT TO LEARN HERE: Everything about facilitative leadership / facilitation as a future leadership skill / community building formats / group dynamics / group psychology / more on group language / more communication feats / become more visiual in space / ... 🤲🏽 WHAT I CAN SHARE WITH YOU: feats and tricks and manifold formats / communication feats / some intercultural experience/knowledge on space and sound and djing / what an orgasm workshop is... ;) Looking forward to a great time shared Göran a.k.a. goranji

How do you make your slides/whiteboards look really professional & not too "home-made"? I find the Designer function in powerpoint is very helpful, but it doesn't always work for slides that are more complex than simple text & pictures. What other options are there to improve slides? I have pretty good ppt skills but I do want to be a team coach not a graphic designer :-)

As more and more workshops and meetings are being held online, it's important to understand the unique challenges and opportunities that come with virtual facilitation. I have found that one of my best practices for virtual facilitation is to create a structured agenda and to stick to it. I also make sure to use interactive tools such as breakout rooms and polls to keep my audience engaged. Another tip that I follow is to actively monitor and manage group dynamics, as it can be more challenging to read the room when working remotely. From building engagement to managing distractions, how do you ensure your virtual workshops are productive and effective? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below and let's start a conversation about virtual facilitation best practices.

I am doing a presentation at a conference next week and am having trouble being sure that I am ending strongly. What are some of your favorite ways to end strong when you will have VERY limited time. The whole presentation is an hour and I have built in several Q/As. There will be 50 in the meeting (much larger than I had anticipated.) So, any ideas on how to end stronger?

AutoDraw is a new kind of drawing tool. It leverages machine learning to help users create quick, professional-looking drawings, even if they don't possess any formal artistic skills. Also, it's completely free! The tool works by analyzing users' rough sketches and then suggesting more polished, professionally-drawn alternatives. When you draw an image, AutoDraw interprets the lines and shapes to understand what you're attempting to depict. As you sketch, it offers a range of related images that have been pre-drawn by artists, which you can select to replace your own sketch. This tool can be really useful for Facilitators in various ways: 1. Visualization: AutoDraw helps Facilitators quickly visualize ideas during meetings or brainstorming sessions. The tool's ability to turn rough sketches into professional drawings makes the resulting visuals more clear and accessible for all participants. 2. Engagement: Using this tool could be the perfect icebreaker or warm-up activity for remote sessions. AutoDraw can make sessions more interactive and fun, as participants can try their hand at drawing and see their sketches turned into professional images. This can help boost engagement and creativity. 3. Accessibility: It helps Facilitators create visuals even if they lack drawing skills. This levels the playing field and enables everyone to contribute visually to discussions, regardless of their artistic abilities. 4. Efficiency: With AutoDraw, Facilitators can create visuals quickly, which can make meetings more efficient. Instead of spending time trying to perfect a drawing, they can focus more on the meeting's content and discussions. 5. Documentation: Facilitators can use AutoDraw to document discussions or decisions visually, making it easier for participants to remember and reference later. I know you could argue that this tool can stifle people's creativity BUT I do believe it can very beneficial if you're in a hurry and want to add images to your sessions. OR if you're creating content for LinkedIn and want to add visuals to your slides, this is the perfect tool to create images in a fast and efficient way!

Wahey!, I happily completed the 'Facilitators Fundamentals Course'. Looking forward to receiving certificate, facilitating a session and meeting some likeminded folks. Many thanks Jonathon and Rebecca for great video sessions and informative training materials.😎

Hey I'm Tasch - I'm a workshop facilitator based in London and I specialise in papercraft - anything from miniature paper homes to artist books. I am the founder of youth organisation Assemblage Collective, for which I run lots of my workshops. I am really hoping to branch even more into freelance workshop facilitation & am keen to learn from others in this fantastic space...and, who knows, maybe even collaborate! 😊https://www.instagram.com/assemblage_collective/