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!

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 💛

Hey team, do you have any suggestions on articles or books that discuss effective communication between Supervisors and employees?

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 all! Very excited to be here in the Facilitators Club. Makes me happy to see already so many people from the Workshopper Master Community but also a lot of new faces who are interested in facilitation! I have a background in architecture and am located in Belgium. Interested in anything that has to do with facilitation, architecture, our behavior in buildings, workplaces and how that affects our mental health, productivity, collaboration and so on. Currently doing more research about it so if you know any podcasts, articles, books, people, ANYTHING 😂 please let me know! PS: I'm also a beauty and the beast fan and I can sing every word to 'Be Our Guest', but only in Dutch (with facial expressions). Working on the English version at the moment. Take care and I'll see you around!

Hello everyone! My name is Jason and I am an expat 🇺🇸 living and working in Beijing, China. I work in a private school, but also 'moonlight' as a workshop facilitator 🕝. I have organized and run a few 'design sprints' 🏃‍♂️ within the context of senior leadership in schools. Most of the time our topics are about 'community optics' or 'curriculum'. However, as a 'design' educator I use sprints with students as well. Cannot wait to connect and collaborate! 🤝 I also created and host a podcast all about the 'design' of education if anyone is interested then please give me a shout! And happy year of the rabbit!

Love this! I'm based in Amsterdam and would love to connect and collaborate with other facilitators interested in cultural impact and societal development. Looking forward 🚀

Hi everybody, Stephan here from The Netherlands!🎈 Short introduction: I'am Stephan and as a CCO responsible for introducing Splandid (www.splandid.nl) on the Dutch market. Splandid is a new Field Service Management tool for SME companies. It is unique through the combination of ERP, CRM and planning software.

Hey guys I wanted to ask you : what’s your key(s)to growth personally or professionally ? Can’t wait for your answers 😁

Hey everyone!! My name’s Asif and i’m a Scrum Master in a Management Consultancy based out of London. Happy to join this vibrant community. Look forward to learning more about Facilitation from you all 😀.

Hey Y'all. Looking forward to sharing and learning in this club.

I was off to India, New Delhi for training, just missed interacting with you guys,every post and every comment is a new learning, from the other side I managed to network with people from over 20 countries which was amaaaaazing experience :) :) :) Now I back to learning with you :) :) :)

I was wondering if you (all) could share what specific fields, or industries (types of businesses), your clients are in? I think it might be useful for new Facilitators to home-in on specific areas for their marketing... Cheers, James

One of my favorite books of all time is 'The Power of Moments' by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. In this book, Chip and Dan talk about improving experiences for others, and they explore what makes occasions unique and memorable. Psychologists have found that, when we reflect on our experiences, we tend to remember two moments in particular: The "peak"—the best moment of a positive experience—and the ending. Peak Moments are things that happen that are out of the ordinary; they're unexpected and a bit of a surprise. These moments disproportionally impact how we remember an event. These moments make us feel excited, motivated, and surprised! So here's the question for all of us: Are we paying attention to these moments as facilitators? Are we consciously creating peaks for our customers or participants, or employees? You could run an average workshop, sticking to the agenda, and everything would run smoothly. BUT, if you've designed your plan to include a few peak moments throughout, people will remember this workshop to be incredibly special and memorable. They're more likely going to want to have you facilitate another workshop for them in the future so that you create this unique experience for them again. ❓So how can you create these peak moments in your workshops❓ 💪 Start your workshops strong: Make sure you make the group feel welcome when they arrive at the workshop. What we did in a recent workshop to create a peak moment at the beginning was we made a welcome poster with every participants name on it in fun colourful writing. We also had a little goodie bag on each persons chair for them to take home. This was filled with simple things like a notebook, sharpie, post-its and our own AJ&Smart stickers. Another workshop we had everyone wait outside the room, we blasted some high energy music and let the participants in. We high-fived each person as they came in and everyone was super pumped before the workshop even started. 🎉 Celebrate wins/milestones: Throughout your workshops, make sure to celebrate when a group finishes an exercise with a simple high five. Get everyone up and out of their seats and praise their efforts by taking a nice break outside of the office space. Take them to get ice-cream or go for a nice walk together. In a recent workshop, we rented an ice-cream van and let the group know that on their 15 minute break they could go grab an ice-cream and sit in the sun. This is a peak moment that they won't forget!

Hi all! @Rebecca Courtney Please, could you help me with this doubt. What is the role of the Decisor in exercise 3 concept (when she/he has to sketch the solution), does she/he also have to do this exercise or does she/he only vote for it at the end of Day 2? It is a bit confusing for me because in the tutorial video there are 4 participants, but only 3 solutions are shown, so I had this doubt.

As a community we should share with and celebrate each others successes and failures. So, in this thread I'm going to suggest we celebrate successes we have had, whether small or large. I'll start off. I'm celebrating the successful workshop I did with the Vietnamese subsidiary of a German company yesterday with the supervisory and management staff with a workshop I created for them "Hands-On Introduction to Creativity." I started off with my well-proven warm-up "Interview an Expert" and then went on to introduce 3 creativity exercises to help them think deeper about a particular problem, and to begin to generate ideas (5-Why's, Question Storming, Visual Stimuli). The second half of the workshop was exploring experimentation, risk, and failure with the Failure Toy. Something I learned from this is that factory workers don't appear to like expensive, high-end chocolate (I used Marou Chocolate, a high-end organic/pure Vietnamese chocolate brand for prizes).

I would like to create a facilitation kit for on the road and also a organised kit for in house. I'm wondering what kinds of things everyone would put in their kits. I can come up with: - Sticky notes 🗒️ - Sharpies 🖊️ - Voting dots 🔴 - Time timer ⏲️ - ... ...and also where do you put all those things in? Is it a plastic box, a suitcase or something else? Please leave your thoughts in the comments, maybe my new kit is created by all of your input.🙂

Here’s why 😀😂

Clicked on classroom… Where is level 1 ?

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! 👇

Helloooo Facilitators 👋 This is a question that comes up A LOT and I would love to hear your answers to it. What's the value of Facilitation? In other words, why do teams need Facilitation/Facilitators? It's so important to be able to answer this question because it will help you convince potential clients of the value you can add to their teams as a Facilitator. Leave your answers in the comments. Looking forward to getting a discussion going on this. Rebecca 💟

Recently I read a post by @Kerri Price in linkedin where she was asked if “Aren’t you worried they’ll copy your stuff?” when she readily shares her tips and tricks with other facilitators. Her answer is similar to mine so I decided to share here with you a video I use as reference to address this topic where Steve Jobs is quoting Picasso and saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” What this means is that we are all stealing from each other! Aj&Smart steals from the Design Sprint and dozens of facilitation books, the Design Sprint steals from lean startup and agile methodologies, the business model canvas steals from visual thinking, and so on and so forth! Now, notice that stealing in this quote is better than copying! While copying would be the mere act of doing the same as someone else without making it your own, stealing is here referred to as the act of copying with care, property and adaptation to your own context. This is what Picasso was referring to. So steal away, avoid copying, and give credit where credit is due! This is how we evolve ;) Joao

What are some of your favorite techniques or resources for creating effective visualizations in your work, and how do you use them to communicate complex ideas or data to others? I'm really interested in hearing everyone's thoughts on their favorite visualization techniques and resources. Personally, I'm a big fan of Bikablo techniques, which use a combination of simple drawings and text to create engaging and memorable visualizations.

To all the folks working in Corporate Innovation domain, just wanted to check from this elite group of facilitators - What kind of facilitation you have been doing majorly? It could be multiple items as well, but wanted to understand what's that 1 thing which you are passionate about and you do your best while facilitating 😊 Looking forward to see your responses !

Hello All, I facilitated a 21 off-site person workshop (internal to my company) last Monday, 27th Feb. For the first time I produced a Survey Monkey survey to gauge impressions of the workshop. So far & after a reminder 12hrs after the initial survey email went out, I have had 9 respondents. Having tried surveying before, I know that the number of respondents to a survey will be very low (43% i.e. 9 out of 21 in this case - which might be as good as it gets). The results are in the attached screen grab. My questions are: 1. What's a good percentage for 'satisfied participants' after a workshop? 2. Feedback appreciated on the types of questions that I asked in the survey! 3. The weakest area was my 'explanation of the exercises'. I used the AJ&S format for explaining an exercises, if you are familiar with this. I really struggle with explaining. I think that I need to iterate several versions of the exercise explanation. And may drop the exercise if the explanation doesn't make sense, as this might be indicative of the exercise not actually making any sense?

Hello everyone! How did you get your first facilitation job? I can't exactly remember what was ours. I think it was a workshop for an Irish MBA course. I got recommended by a guy I used to work with about 15 years ago.

The recently published "State of Facilitation report for 2023" is now available for access. Conducted by SessionLab, the report involved gathering feedback from more than 1000 facilitators, aiming to reflect the current state of facilitation and offer useful guidance, knowledge, and perspective for those who work as facilitators worldwide. You can find the report by clicking on this link: https://www.sessionlab.com/state-of-facilitation/ What do you find most interesting? What do you find most surprising?

Hi all, As asked today during our meetup here is a link to the egg drop exercise. It's from Nasa and good enough to get started https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/556927main_Adv-RS_Egg_Drop.pdf @Jonathan Courtney if you have a more detailed resource please share it :) The variant I recommended today was to divide participants in two types of teams: - The "More time, less tries" team: this team has 1 to 1.5 hours but only 2 eggs, and they need to have 1 egg for the final demo when the time ends, so in practice they have one try-out. - The "less time, more tries" team: this team has 30 to 45 minutes but has unlimited eggs (well nothing is unlimited but you get what I mean ahah) When you drop the eggs in the final comparison 99% of the time the "less time, more tries" teams win! The exercise stimulates collaboration, prototyping and experimentation, demonstrating that more experiments and iterations beat more time and analysis. Joao

I love running workshops. And I'm delighted to stumble my way into this club filled with other people who do too! I've been doing facilitation of one kind of another for a long time now. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm on a mission to master Hybrid workshops. For work, I'm an engagement lead at Red Hat, and I'm currently the maintainer and product owner of the Open Practice Library I never really know what to write in these sorts of things. if you're curious, please just ask me questions here! 😊

Are also facilitators here who are freaking nervous and anxious before their meeting, session or workshop starts? Do you have any advise how to not freak out before? 😅 Although I would say I am always pretty good prepared and my sessions are running smoothly I get so anxious before, struggle with my imposter syndrome and expect the worst to happen. As soon as the meeting starts I get very calm and confident, so it is actually the time before which is really stressful for me although I really love what I do and I love the role of the facilitator.