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!

When I lived in Canada I signed up with Retreatify (https://www.retreatify.com/) which helps organizations with planning corporate retreats and offsites. They take care of the venues, catering, logistics and also have a database of vendors that run different workshops and team building activities. I did not get a ton of inquiries through the website (also because of covid) but now I do get the odd request, but they think I am still based in Canada. So I was wondering if there are similar platforms or companies that are based in Europe. Have you worked with any of them and found them useful or not to find new clients?

This post is inspired by one of the previous questions in the group (can't remember the person's name atm, will edit later). It's a common Design Sprint myth that design sprint isn't very useful for new products but works only for the products that need refinement. While it's understandable for this to be a common standpoint, there are very solid arguments why that's not the case and I'll lay out just a few of them. It's ok not to have a specific product and it's ok to assume things in the Design Sprint. The Design Sprint is here to help us "solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days" (or four days in the case of DS 2.0). So, DS is here to make assumptions, and to test if the idea works in the real world. You can deal with specifics in the later stages of product development. There will probably be the whole UX process for defining specifics, where you can use user interviews, user journey mapping, discovery workshops, etc. Also, remember the hotel robot from the Sprint book. That being said, if you're doing Design Sprint for a new thing, a thorough expert interview should help. Having a UX designer or researcher on the team helps because they usually know general research, the basics of psychology, and behavioral patterns. Together with the team, you'll be able to define and assume what a good customer journey will be and test it out on the testing day or later as a follow-up to the Sprint. Test ideas freely, and don't be afraid to fail! Feel free to add to this and describe your experiences!

Hi guys! How are you? I have a question about the map exercise in the Design Sprint: The map works good for a customer journey that already exists, but what about we are dealing with a need that customers don't know they have yet, or if there isn't an existing solution that customers already use to meet their needs, in other words, what should we do if there isn't a journey that users go through? For example: before Facebook launch for the first time, how would be their map?

After reviewing some basics videos on Workshop (Thanks to @Aj Smart youtube channel), I'd like to execute what I learned. So want to run a workshop with my team or any workshop opportunity I'll find in the future, but how can I convince someone to run a workshop??

I'm curious as to whether most facilitators are generalists (facilitating any form of process within an organisation) or tend to specialise in particular areas? And are free-lancers more typically generalists? What do you consider yourself? Do you focus on particular areas of work (or processes)?

Hey Facilitators! Meeting so many of you on the first Facilitator Club community call last night was great! During the call, we chatted about the following: - our first facilitation experiences - how do you explain your role as a facilitator to others - how to get facilitation clients What other community events would you like to see us organize?

What are some of your go-to exercises when facilitating UX or Product Discovery workshops? EDIT: I figured I didn't elaborate on his topic more, sorry for that! I didn't mention I actively do these. 🤓 So I am more interested in your experiences with some "unusual" workshop exercises besides those "standard" ones (like empathy mapping, feature bucketing, etc.) From my experience, some of the exercises I actively use are contextual mapping, empathy mapping (preferably if there are people we can find for interviewing), customer journey mapping (current vs. desired, might add HMWs to this exercise as well), feature prioritization and hierarchy, AttrakDiff scale, etc.

With almost 1800 members in this group so far and with all the various backgrounds and experiences in here, I want to try to put what we’re learning in the world of facilitation and workshopping into practice with this new challenge! I will be posting anonymized client briefs (repurposed briefs from past clients of AJ&Smart) over the next few weeks and I would love for you to design a workshop to meet these briefs. I have attached our Agenda template that you can use to complete this task. In the comments section, you can write the same headings in this template to give you some guidance. This template follows AJ&Smart’s 4C’s Framework for structuring ANY workshop. So...what is the 4C’s Framework? We’re glad you asked! The 4C’s stand for Collect, Choose, Create, and Commit. The 4C’s Framework can be used to design any workshop regardless of topic, length, or outcome. If you want to get the full breakdown of how it works and how to use it in your workshops, you can download the Workshopper Playbook, where we explain everything in detail! 🗣️So, let’s hear from the client: “Hi! I’m Jack, the product manager of a small team at Dream Big Corporations. I manage a team of 7 developers. Lately, I’ve noticed that this team is finding it difficult to connect and are regularly misaligned on decisions being made for the company. In particular, I have noticed there’s a lack of trust between group members, and they tend to blame each other if work isn’t completed. I am looking for ways to improve the culture within this department and empower these individuals to work together as a team, trust each other and deepen connections. I would like you to run a 3-hour workshop at our HQ in Stockholm. At the end of the workshop, I would like to have a list of team-building activities or suggestions that will help improve trust and connection within this department. My main goal is for this team to trust each other and to communicate more effectively moving forward."

I'm curious to know what kind of facilitation everyone does...? While I recognise that Facilitation Skills/ Principles apply across all types of facilitation, I've seen a lot of posts/comments around Design Thinking, Design Sprints, UX... Apart from supporting facilitators to hone their craft, I do a lot of facilitation in the Community Engagement / Social Impact space. Strategic Planning, Community Consultation, Partnership Brokering... that kind of thing. I'm keen to see the breadth of facilitation that's in this community.

Hello everyone! I have one topic to discuss. Have you ever transformed a standard meeting into a workshop? How did you do that? For example, there are weekly meetings for a project, backlog refinements, design review meetings, etc. Do you have any experience transforming these, sometimes tedious meetings, into productive workshops? How did you do that or how would you do it?