Over the last 2 months I've been facilitating a book club themed around getting a job as a product/ux designer. The current format is - People arriving - Rating the book out of 5 and talking about why - An exercise or 2 (for articulating design decisions we each noted down a time when we had a difficult stakeholder, why it happened and what we learned from it) - How well use what we learn to improve our job search - Open forum - What should we read next? Has anyone facilitated a book club before? I'm trying to strike the balance between giving people the space to talk, keeping good time and us leaving feeling more confident in the area we're talking about. I know it's not strictly facilitation like design sprints but I do see it as facilitating a group of people to get to a certain outcome. Any ideas or advice would be amazing to hear!

Hey Workshoppers! Just thought this might be a useful tip/warning for those of you using Chat GPT a lot: It's pretty easy to tell when someone's using it! I see a few posts here in the community which I'm 100% sure were "generated" and they not only lack any sort of personality, but they also get no engagement. As in, nobody replies to them, they just take up space. The same thing will happen if you email people/clients, create posts on Linkedin etc. They won't respond. Believe me, I get 50 messages a day on Linkedin trying to sell me stuff/get a job and I can always tell when they are Chat GTP generated. You're writing needs to have some personality and authenticity for people to care enough to interact with it. Sure, I get it, if you're non-native English speaking, it's super helpful to be able to use something like this... but to be honest, I think it's better to just write how you write and then use Google Translate. So yeah, just a note to those using it as a "silver bullet". It's very obvious, it's not enjoyable to read and it can make you come across as being very dull. Cheers, Jonathan

My absolute favourite icebreaker is called draw a duck, it’s as simple as it sounds. 🦆 1️⃣ Give everyone post-its and a sharpie 2️⃣ Give them 60 seconds to draw a duck 3️⃣ Have them all put their ducks on the whiteboard 4️⃣ Briefly review your ducks as a group. That’s it. I love it because it’s a quick and effective way to inject a bit of fun into the start of the workshop. Plus, it lowers the bar for visualising ideas later, showing that ability to draw doesn’t matter. Want to practice? Grab a post-it and drop a picture of your duck in the comments, then tag someone in Faciltiator club do the same! 🦆 I'll start us off in the comments! 👇

Hello dear friends, I would like to know what strategy or arguments you use so that companies hire services from external facilitators on a permanent basis. And not only when the company detects a specific problem to solve. Thank you.

Would love to hear from anyone involved in Design Thinking and how you apply it to facilitation. Curious also about the resources you have access to, courses you've learned from and any DT community you may be a part of (I myself am a part of IxDF). Do share!