"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee Imagine you could pick a single workshop exercise to truly master - and do it 10,000 times. Which one would it be - and why?

After going through couple of videos from @Aj Smart youtube channel, I feel learning to facilitate is really going to help me in my career as a UX/UI Designer. But my question is where can I learn about it? Where can I learn those tricks, where can I learn to build a 'robust' toolkit?, etc. You know the internet is an ocean of knowledge, but I can't read/study everything, so if you know any resources to follow please let me know.

When I first started facilitating, I was lucky to get a lot of experience early on, but I always struggled with the unpredictable nature of the workshops. I wanted the workshops to come out as I had planned them, not how they went. When I later trained as a coach, we had an improv trainer in for half a day, and I went to do more training with him. Just another half day with him, but enough to allow me to switch my perspective on what works - and to trust that I could improvize. That was the single best thing I ever did for both my coaching and my facilitation skills. Improv allowed me to be in the moment much more - and to trust that what ever I would come up with would be the right thing for the group - and if it wasn't I could figure it out with the group. It helps me assess the group, the actual needs and to allow workshops to go in entirely different directions than planned. Mind you, I probably would do this (too much) in a Design Sprint, but a strategy session can become a team building session and an ideation session can become a concept building workshop if need be. I does take a tool box that allows you to improvize, but when you've done a few of each, - and you take a 15 minute break to re-evalute and align with the workshop owner, then you can figure out next steps. I found that it's always better to end up doing the right thing and not make it through all the exercises than to continue with the wrong thing and finish up on time. During my last Design Sprint, I realized that despite several meeting about the focus of the workshop, it turned out that participants had very different understandings of this focus and the project. Some knew exactly what the focus was, but a few were off topic. So we broke out of the room, and into a different physical room - we disassociated from the Design Sprint. Did a small workshop in there to align on the content and the focus, - and then we went back into the Design Sprint room and continued. We were 90 minutes behind schedule by lunch time, but the alignment helped us tremendously, and we caught up with the schedule by Tuesday afternoon.

How awesome would it be to have a book club and discuss it all together? Calling on all executives 😀 @Rebecca Courtney @Jakub Michalski @Jonathan Courtney

I was wondering: Do you have any tips & tricks to improve the chances of your workshop results? I mean outside of the “core” workshop design (e.g. what exercises to use, what participants to invite etc.) Here are three that come to my mind: 1️⃣ Make Sure Everyone is Well Rested Because we make worse decisions when we’re tired. 💡 Don’t start your workshop at 8 am, don’t make it too exhausting and plan frequent breaks. 2️⃣ Make Sure Everyone is Well Fed After we eat, our dopamine levels increases. Dopamine helps nerve cells to send messages to each other. Exactly what you want for your group in a workshop! 💡 Don’t be cheap - saving money on lunch or snacks will cost you in form of poor decisions! 3️⃣ Change the Environment During the workshop - if the group sees what they see every day, their thinking will be tied to what they think every day. You know how all those top execs always have their strategy retreats away from their office? They’re doing it for a reason. 💡 To get fresh ideas, change the environment. Anything else? Let me know what other tricks you use to improve your chances!