Last week I facilitated a 2 hour workshop for an insurance company that wants to introduce a new offer to grow and change direction due to new California law that is killing its cash cow offer. To put things in context, in the past I charged $2k for a day. But, it never hurts to ask even thought the thought feels frightening. Best of the experience is that this was the first time I run this type of workshop - “The Story Framework Sprint” and in a new Indutry. Quote from the CEO - “we have too much knowledge in our head that it’s confusing to make sense of it in a simple way”. This helps to simplify our focus.

Hey all, I've been meaning to post up in the group to thank everyone who took part in the previous LDJ practice session and had any input whatsoever as I was planning my multi-team 60+ LDJ for a public sector IT department. Thanks to @David Rovira for giving me a friendly nudge 🤣👌 I'm glad to report both sessions on the day went well and were deemed as successful 👌🥳🤙 63 participants, 8 tables and a lot of Post-It notes! By the end of the second session I had been asked by the Strategic Manager if I had availability in a couple of weeks time for a session with just the management team 💪 That's now booked in for later this month. I had some fantastic immediate feedback from the LDJ sessions...but one of the very best moments was when I watched a team manager take a photo of his team's completed Impact/Effort chart...I knew it was going to be extremely helpful to him and his team. Many lessons learned from the day...from music volume to desk prep and how to draw a damn anchor 🤣, I'll add my lesson's learned at the bottom of this post. Thank you to EVERYONE in this amazing community that helped me create a successful session! 🙏 ------------------------------------------------- Lessons learned: I wrote up some simple lessons for myself and I know a few asked me to share when I could. So, here they are: LDJ lessons: 1. Preempt unruly behaviour - Check to see if there could be any problematic participants. Make sure to make it clear prior to the event how important the no discussion request is. 2. Music volume - Check the size of the room compared to the size of your Bluetooth speaker! Even though I have a good speaker, it still meant turning it up way louder than I expected...only found out when I walked to the back of the room and could barely hear it. 3. Put in writing what you'll need from the client on the day! ie flip charts etc. Don't leave it to chance or a verbal acknowledgement. You will get let down. 4. There's always time to read notes on the upcoming exercise when the participants are busy with the current one! 5. Reduce or increase the time given at will...no one will know! Taught in the WM course and I used it...a lot! 6. If not a full day session: Check what else the participants will be doing on the day. Are they going to be tired or disengaged due to other work or impact within the day/week. It may change the direction of the session. 7. Too much time is just as troublesome as not enough time, but you can always fill gaps with too much time. 8. Large groups - run totally separate exercises with the same subject/task. Bring together only when necessary, such as to agree a HMW. Personally I will only bring back together at the end to share ideation from now on.

After a couple of months of intense study, practice, and Inner Circle Mentorship, I’ve landed my first official Sprint!! I’ll be collaborating during a 9-Week Customer Experience Sprint with key members of an AI startup, providing consulting advice, and helping improve the flow, look & feel, and overall experience for a new digital product. The main goal will be to assist the team in establishing product/market fit and proving traction. Among the many fancy exercises I’m planning for this engagement, we’ll collect User Challenges, perform Task Analysis, and build a User Story Map. I will also help them complete a Lean UX Canvas to establish our testing hypotheses, and document a Product Roadmap to identify and prioritize additional features. The pièce de résistance and main deliverable will be an interactive, high-fidelity prototype we’ll use to get feedback from test customers in several rounds of Usability Testing. I am extremely happy and grateful to the AJ&Smart team, for ensuring I did the deed. Special mention of course to @Jonathan Courtney but also to @Rebecca Courtney, @Tim Höfer, and so many others that pointed the way forward. I also want to give thanks to the many colleagues who helped me to grow, and who took time to practice with me some of these exclusive top 1% skills. Too many to mention, so suffice to say if I forgot you I owe you a tall drink ;) whenever you’re in Florida! Here it goes… Thanx to @Graham Thompson @Julie Taplin @Yash Mehta @Jill Banks @Abdul Salam @Benedict Odjobo @Javier von Westphalen @Ömür Yanıkoğlu @Riya Korah @Tarrush Kapoor @Chrissy Braun @Elli Nikolaou @Celine Tran @Teresa Middleton @Irina Volfson @Michelle Audsley Myers @Kristi Shumway @Keith Wasserman @Sabine Braubach @LaYinka Sanni @Lina Robayo @Luca Terminiello @Alexandra Pinegger @Trevor Wood @Kristen Cattell @Hind Bayane @Laure Duchamp @Bret Koontz @Coco Curry @David Marks @Anat Akiva @Talia Johnson @Chris Davis @Shelley McKeating … You’re All Stars!! 🌟✨

I just wanted to give a HUGE shout-out to all those who showed up for the Saturday LDJ session. Participants, Co-Facilitators and Organisers...thank you! I honestly can't thank you all enough. This community is the best! The constructive feedback at the end was truly inspirational 🙏 A special thanks to @David Rovira and @Keith Wasserman for their work and time, you both had my back 👌 I am sure David will be posting some recordings from it but in the meantime here are my main takeaways: - Remind everyone - Work Together Alone...in silence - This is a major one - For Remote - Use an example room, especially with HMW - Impact/Effort - Complete separately i.e. horizontal then vertical not both at the same time - If possible, be a little more detailed when explaining the scenario - Keep the HMW post-it above the impact/effort section as a reminder - Solution Post-its - Need to look at them before moving them across! - Explain the solution after completion - Look into tech issue - Why can we not hear in breakout rooms LOTS of learning...but also lots of praise and positive feedback...thank you all!

One of the great things about what we do is you can do it as an employee or go out and become your own company. Whilst the later comes with amazing benefits there are a lot of areas that need to be considers… Like - What does it take to set myself up as a business or do I just contract in. - If I am setting myself up as a business am I a sole trader.. registering by business - Defining your purpose and setting clear goals yearly, quarterly - Defining your target customers, products, services and financials. Whilst this is a passion space for a lot of us, you still need to understand your revenue needs. - Branding and marketing - What do you need to set yourself up… physically, technology - Contracts for engagements - How to build a pipeline, managing you customer base Making sure you get work life balance! Would be interested in hearing and learning from each other on what made sense for you and what you would like to share with the rest of the community…

Hey Facilitators! We filmed a trailer for Facilitator Club explaining what inspired us to start this community! Take a look and let us know what you think! And while you're at it, say hi to @Juan Sebastian Elinan, who shot and edited this masterpiece. 💛

Surprised to see a search for StreamDeck showed up with no results on this group. It has been a game changer for me in terms of productivity, but also for hosting online, virtual workshops. If you're on a mac, you can actually program a Do Not Disturb toggle as a button (you can also do this using the Mission Control features on Mac, but I always forget to do this). Here's how to do it: 1. Select Systems Settings in your Apple Menu 2. Scroll down to Keyboard 3. In Keyboard, select "Keyboard Shortcuts" 4. Select "Mission Control" 5. By default, Focus Mode has no assigned keystroke. Double click over "none" and type your desired keystroke 6. Now, simply configure your StreamDeck with the keystroke you previously assigned.7. That's it! Hope this helps someone!

Calling all Facilitator Club members - "Retainers - A Balancing Act" We recently had an interesting discussion on retainers within the Inner Circle group. Sparked by our very own @Jonathan Courtney and his views on them. We're now having a community-run presentation on the Strategy of Facilitation Retainers - Their pros and cons including how to sell the idea to your clients; I wanted to invite the Facilitator Club members too! This will be an open presentation for all Inner Circle and Facilitator Club members, so a good time to network too! The presentation will be for 30 minutes with a further 30 minutes for questions/discussion. We will have a little overrun time but it's important to keep this session concise and on-topic. DETAILS: Thursday 28th Sept - 7pm CEST Berlin Time / 6pm BST London Time (GMT+1) Join "Retainers - A Balancing Act" Zoom Meeting: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82818362181?pwd=ExEfgBXarn8KDADF3k3adrQCJNJPyf.1 Meeting ID: 828 1836 2181 Passcode: 436010 ------------------------ Agenda - 🚀Intro 🚀Presentation - Including strategy 🚀Q&A 🚀Handouts I really hope you can make it live 🥳💪

Just finished... Wow, so simple, yet so empowering. One of my favorite things from this course is the actual framework itself. I don't mean the framework as a tool, but rather the framework as a mindset. What I mean is: it puts you in a frame of mind that everyone needs to contribute their ideas, come up with solutions, come to an agreement, and decide on what to do... It's really like the design sprint in a nutshell. This 4C framework is like the design sprint disguised as any workshop... It's like taking the design sprint and refactoring it to do whatever you want... Pretty awesome. What are some of your favorite takeaways?

Did anybody the workshopper masterclass? What was your experience?

How important is knowing your audience to you when conducting a workshop? What do you do to prepare yourself when meeting with various people from different backgrounds?

Hello Everyone. 👋 My name is Alex. I am based in Lyon (France). I am new to this club and very excited to take part in conversations around facilitation and sharing tips and tricks to better engage our groups in trainings and workshops. I have started facilitating 5 years ago and boy! It has been a great journey where I found myself always learning and trying new things. It has been a blast but now I am ready to take it to the next level. This is why I am here. Looking forward to sharing with you... 😉

Morning everyone! I am reasonably new to facilitation and the company I work for are the same. In recent months I have been asked to facilitate more and more discussions and workshops to support the business in optimising their time together and ensuring we come away with the desired outcomes. I am naturally outcomes focussed and enjoy helping others. My organisation is recognising this skill and have asked me to facilitate a virtual, 30 person Strategy Review session and I’m wondering how I can gently introduce such a large group (for me!!) to workshopping techniques and get to the end result, without losing them (or my cool!) along the way! Any advice would be much appreciated. I think I’m looking for a balance of structured discussion, which they’re comfortable and some easy to manage activities to ensure we have all the data we need to review our progress and potential opportunities for our long term objectives. Thanks in advance. 🙂

Hi everyone! Which method you prefer best to do for product roadmap ideation workshop? Or the one with the shortest time spend on? I’m trying to facilitate all the stakeholder that still unsure on how to decide business & brand strategy of a loyalty/crm app into more community based app. I want to make them be able to define their own plan on the product and have them all 1 mind. Thank you

In any meeting or workshop, I always start with some kind of activity to engaje people within each other and with the theme of the event. My favorite is Blind Portrait: a game where, in pairs, people try to draw each others faces, but without looking at the paper! That way, anyone can make a drawing full of character and surprises. In the end, each person have to choose their favorite drawing and introduce themselves with that! What about you?