Hi all, I have the opportunity to conduct some focus groups with some union members who are disgruntled with Management. Management is looking to fix the issues. They want anonymous data collection. These are pretty small groups. I was thinking sailboat. What else can we use to collect honest and transparent feedback about the state of things? Thanks!

Hi all, anyone willing to share the verbiage they are using to open doors to facilitation in the US? Their meetings are ineffective. Their leaders are spending more than 50% of their time in meetings. I am struggling to get a meeting to show the value of Facilitation. It is difficult to call your baby ugly however it's likely the reason why it's so difficult to sell facilitation. Admitting you have a "meeting" problem is a problem not many leaders are willing to accept. Thanks in advance. Here's what I'm doing on LinkedIn if anyone wants to take a look. https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliemcmanusohio/

Hi all, looking for your "end stronger" experiences. I am conducting a strategy workshop for a non-profit Monday evening. I was thinking of ending the session with their super powers they will bring to the table in 2024 to make sure they meet their strategic goals. Looking for other ideas. We talk a lot about ice breakers.... need a strong ending. Thanks in advance! Julie

I am sharing my experience -from the trenches- of how we managed to run a hybrid design sprint with over 300 participants. You can thank @Andra Stefanescu for encouraging me to share it. I probably can't go as detailed as I would like to, but here it goes. I recently facilitated a hybrid design sprint with over 300 university students at an open social innovation event organized by the Peruvian Ministry of Production. The event aimed to tackle complex environmental issues. Think of it as a four-day hackathon. Previously screened participants were divided into groups of seven using an algorithm that analyzed their backgrounds to create more diverse sprint groups. Some of them were located at a University campus while others joined via Zoom. I also joined via Zoom from my country. To start, the organizers presented three major challenges that needed to be solved and that affected particular groups of people. Days before "Sprint Week", participants had the opportunity to listen to and interview people affected by the problems, as well as experts who were brought in to help them gather data and define more specifically the problem they would solve. I have to say that defining the problem is probably the most difficult part for participants and it is something we need to work around and improve it. But we've managed to make it work somehow 🤭 To assist the participants, we assigned a "design sprint mentor" to each of the three categories. These mentors were responsible for answering questions and providing guidance to the volunteers assigned to each group and the participants themselves. Both mentors and volunteers had prior knowledge of design thinking and received a design sprint onboarding before the event to clear up any questions regarding the process. We also had a team supporting on the technical side -HUUUGEEE kudos to them. During "Sprint Week" if any problems could not be resolved by the mentors, they were escalated to me as the design sprint master.

Hi folks, I'll start off with a lovely sob story; I was let go from a leadership position in a software startup company in Aug last year. Totally had seen it coming, and I was capital M-iserable in the role. Previously i'd been leading software functions and just got sick of the hyper political manuvering. So in my time after I'd thought about what I really enjoyed doing no matter, as I didn't want to climb that ladder again to experience the same level of misery and it stood out; I enjoyed helming workshops. My early days I'd been a trainer but the travel burnt me out, i'd done consulting, design thinking based prototyping and loved the interactions but less the project management and finally I found purpose running workshops at the companies i'd been in leadership to get strategy going. So I've decided I want to be a workshopper, and help move the room wherever possible. My catch is that with a young family, I have massage my network to a point that a full-time facilitation (Freelance), is strong enough to make good "oh god i'm saving money for my kid to spend" bank. Where I am now is about to accept a job that will give me a much needed capital platform, while I grow. Here i stand in this wonderful forum and can't wait to learn about how you've all achieved the goal of doing this grand job full-time. Mike (from Tasmania, but living in Brooklyn).