Let's accept it - workshops not always go as planned, and we are always dealing with 'oh-no' situations (at least me!) So I thought to share and also learn from everyone's failures but with the mindset of 'failing forward' - every mistake can turn into a stepping stone for success in the future. I'll start with one learning from this week, and I'd love to hear your lessons learnt too! [plan] In an online workshop where participants from various countries were expected, I did an ice-breaking exercise where I shared a screen of a white world map and asked colleagues to put a stamp on where they are at the moment. [what happened] it took forever for some participants to find out how to stamp and annotate on zoom, while some got it immediately. So it wasn't smooth. Lots of scribbles on the white board too. And, actually majority of them were from the same countries so the activity didn't really serve the purpose of showing the diversity of participants. It fell flat and made it a not-so-cool start of the workshop. [lessons] - keep the technology super simple, especially if you aren't sure of the level of familiarity - have some back-up questions/activities, in case one question didn't spark interest,

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!

Just joined the community and wanted to wave hello to you all. I live in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and just started out facilitating in my new job. I found out it is hard to just start doing it. So I came here to learn more about what makes a good facilitator. And how I can become better.

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!

Been looking into some solutions for hybrid facilitation (some people are in the meeting room, and others are online) Some common recommendation for IWBs are Jamboard (Google) and Surface Hub (Microsoft) I also found a startup called Vibe, who makes Vibe board as a more affordable option Wonder what are the pros and cons of conducting facilitations with an IWB? And anyone has suggestions for choosing an IWB?