The Best Thing I Ever Did For My Facilitation Skills...

Feb '23 (edited) in Workshops & Exercises 🍔

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.

What has worked for you?

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