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!

Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone here has experience designing workshops or a design sprint for identifying the most practical AI solution for a client. I'm trying to come up with a good structure for an engaging, one-day workshop – where the client would come in as a team and work together to find pain-points, prioritise and come out with a roadmap to help them implement the solution that would be built by an external AI / ML company. The clients are usually not very technical so I'm thinking there would likely need to be some form of inspiration or educational aspect near the start, in order to help guide their ideas in a realistic direction. Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated !

Hello Facilitator Club. I recently ran a half day workshop for a challenging technical team to help a VP of Platform build repour with their technical platform engineers, and change their mindset from technical requirements thinking into customer pain point thinking. Here is a Loom video to give you a teaser of the workshop. I have also attached a sanitised template in Mural (yes I know, its's not our beloved Miro, my hands were tied (sigh)) for anyone who wants to reuse it. If you'd like to dive deep into how I built the workshop, please reach out. Video - https://www.loom.com/share/26b7a8350450445e831fef559dfb1df8?sid=f21036a3-6057-4542-862e-b338266f5ed9 Template attached -

Hello everyone, I met with @Katrina Dargel last week and we discussed meeting fellow workshoppers in London. Excited to meet anyone who is in the London area for a drink on: Date: 27th September Time: 630pm Location: The Lighterman, 3 Granary Square, London N1C 4BH Let's meet, have some drinks and chat about taking over the world with workshopping! Looking forward to connecting face-to-face. All workshopper friends welcome.

This weeks coaching call (5th September '23), spoke to how the power of facilitation can be used as a tool to help people on their journey of culture change within an organisation. Change is hard! This coaching call resonated with my current assignment, where I am working with a large corporate to help their employees shift their mindset from 'digital culture of report-driven' to 'digitisation culture of data-driven'. Over the 12-weeks of 24 now, I have used the problems with communication, egos, leadership types (HIPPO etc) and emotional fear to journal out a number of workshop recipes to bring siloed teams together. Check out the recipe below if you are in a similar situation around culture change. This recipe can be used for CURRENT STATE culture understanding and uses a sustainability behaviour approach to put behaviour to problems to one side. You can also use this receipt to backcast a FUTURE STATE. For Step 4: Change this to Identify Sustainable Needs, as opposed to Pain Points. Enjoy! 🤌 Workshop Recipe: Digital Continents Tool: The Golden Wheel converted to a Systems Relationship Map Why use it: - Visualise with people the structure of current cultural ecosystem and interdependencies that exist between stakeholders connected to development of products and services. Ingredients (step-by-step guide): Step 1: STRAT STRONG - 5mins - Add Context Gathered - As a group, review and discuss the initial group of stakeholders and agree upon the 'stakeholders and environmental compartments' in order design the ecosystem from their perspective. - Keep this stakeholder in mind throughout the activity. - As a group, review and discuss the initial group of flows and agree upon the 'flows' in order design the ecosystem from their perspective. - Keep this flows in mind throughout the activity. Step 2: COLLECT - 10 mins - Add Stakeholders - Ask participants to arrange all initial stakeholders starting from primary to secondary and tertiary on the template in relationship to the their involvement and impact. - Brainstorm and write down any additional stakeholders that might be effected by your service/product on the template. - If participants want to add a stakeholder which is not in the cards, just write it on a post-it and add it on the map. (Recommended 3-15 stakeholders)

Hi all, I would love to hear from the freelancers here. Where did your first clients come from and/or where do they come from today? Do you seek them out online, do you cold-email them on Linkedin, do you get inbound requests from your website, something else? I'm interested in starting out but I'm not sure about the best step forward and what actually brings results to real facilitators.

Hi Facilitators 👋 I'm reaching out because I'd love your insights on this challenge: individuals who hate the idea of workshops. These 'anti-workshop' individuals don't seem to see the value in our sessions and are often quite vocal about their disinterest or dissatisfaction. To understand this perspective better and find ways to address it, I'd like to gather insights from you. 👉 Specifically, I'd love to know: 1. What are some reasons you've come across for people disliking workshops? Are there any common themes or specific complaints that stand out? 2. How have you responded to these 'anti-workshop' sentiments? Are there any strategies or techniques you've found effective in engaging these individuals, alleviating their concerns, or demonstrating the value of workshops? Our goal isn't to convert everyone into a workshop enthusiast, but rather to ensure that our sessions are as inclusive, accessible, and beneficial as possible, even to those who might initially be skeptical or resistant. By understanding the roots of 'anti-workshop' sentiments, I believe we can better address them and improve our practice. I'm looking forward to hearing your experiences and insights. 💛 Thank you in advance for your contributions to this discussion 💛

I'm a bit all over the place when it comes to getting things done. I do my best work in short bursts of high-energy sprints. The rest of the time I’m resting, consuming interesting content, and thinking about what I want to do next. This is exactly what I’m doing right now after completing an intense film shoot for a new online course we’ll be releasing soon. My time is split into 80% ‘rest and consume’ mode and 20% ‘produce and execute’ mode (which is kind of perfect for facilitation I think). One of the greatest thinkers of our time, Naval Ravikant has come to the same conclusion when it comes to working. He calls it “Working like a Lion”. He says: “The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is to sprint as hard as they can while they feel inspired to work, and then rest. They take long breaks. It’s more like a lion hunting and less like a marathoner running. You sprint and then you rest. You reassess and then you try again. You end up building a marathon of sprints. Don’t work like a cow grazing on the field all day.” Source: https://nav.al/work-hard So work hard, then rest hard instead of trying to sustain a constant “mid-level” state. Or... don't! I don't know, that's just my brain! Cheers, Jonathan P.S. I also liked this video on living a chaotic life: https://youtu.be/A2sS00egAzg

Hello awesome Facilitators! Just joined the community and looking forward to the collaboration. Curious to know if anyone is from a life science and health care background. I've been running design sprints for 8 years in this area, and looking to connect with anyone venturing down this path. Thanks in advance.

Hello Facilitators 👋 Thank you so much for all your contributions and active participation so far. We are so appreciative of the value you are all providing within this community. But don’t worry, your contributions will not go unnoticed! A lot of questions have come in about the gamification aspect of this community. What I mean by that is, how you can be rewarded for providing value and actively engaging in this community! In Skool, there is a way you can earn points and level up. The likes, points, and levels system in Skool is a way for you to earn recognition for your contributions and engagement with the group. Here's how it works: 1. Likes: Members can "like" posts, comments, or other contributions made by other members. This serves as a way to show appreciation and support for their efforts. One like = one point. 2. Points: Points are a way to keep track of how much a person has participated in the community. Members can earn points by posting individual posts and commenting on other people’s contributions. 3. Levels: Levels are milestones that a member can reach by earning a certain number of points. These levels serve as recognition for their achievements within the community and come with perks such as access to exclusive AJ&Smart content, course previews, coaching calls and more…). The likes, points, and levels system is a way for us to incentivize and reward active and engaged members, creating a supportive and collaborative environment for everyone here. This Loom video I created will explain everything you need to know about this system and how to unlock rewards! HUGE thank you @Kerri Price, @Will Stammers, @Jeff Panning, @Joao Ribeiro, @David Finnegan, @Hassanein Ismail, @Akshay Chillal, @Nancy Lhoest-Squicciarini, @Sam Pettersson and @Andra Stefanescu (our top 10 members on the Leaderboard) who have provided so much value to this community already. We 💛 you!

me again 🤷‍♂️ Curious to know how everyone is positioning themselves as facilitator within certain industry verticals on linkedin. For example, Telco, energy, healthcare, education. Thank you. T

Hey all! I thought it might be interesting to start a money/success discussion amongst the facilitation chat here as I think being a successful facilitator is just as important as being a great one. So here's a topic I believe strongly about: You have to Pay to be Successful To become successful at anything, you’ll need knowledge and experience. You’ll need to learn hard lessons. To run a successful Design Consultancy, I needed to understand how to build a design team, how to sell, how to market, how to manage and everything in between. To run a successful Online Course business I needed to understand how to build online courses, how to package them and most importantly: how to sell them. To be a high-day-rate Facilitator, I had to learn not only how to run any kind of session for any type of company, but also how to SELL facilitation to any type of company. All 3 required a lot of lessons learned to bring them to their current multi-million dollar revenue states… but I used a different “currency” to build each one. In the end, there are only 2 currencies an entrepreneur can use to learn the lessons needed to become successful: 1. Time 2. Money Time: At the beginning of my career I used the only currency I had a lot of: time. It took years of grinding before AJ&Smart even reached the 7-figure (million-dollar revenue) mark. I was shooting in the dark, trying to build something from scratch, learning the lessons in real-time as they happened. It was like hiking up a mountain with no map, no guide and no signs. Eventually, I made it to the top of the mountain but it was a painful process and it nearly burned me out. This is why I decided to try a different currency for the second business: Money Money: From the beginning of building Workshopper, in fact, even before I created the first line of dialogue for my first course, I decided to pay for the lessons I needed to learn using money! For the second business I decided that if I could pay someone who’d “already been to the top of the mountain” to tell me how to get there quicker and safer, I would pay them. I didn’t want to trudge up the mountain blindly, taking years to learn the lessons that others had already learned the hard way.