Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
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Gamestorming methods now in SessionLab library!

Imagine that you have been asked to lead the next meeting of your team. You know that you have one hour to help the team agree on the project’s next steps. However the last three meetings were painful, ineffective and the team did not decide on anything. So what do you do? Business meetings are supposedly strict, short, and structured. Most of the cases participants are there not because they chose to do so, but was advised to attend or had to. They are normally less engaged or eager to take part in activities, that would be typical for a workshop, feeling like they are wasting their precious time on…

The Best Online Tool to Create Workshops [Case Study]

How would you solve the challenge of designing an international train-the-trainer course with 10 trainers? And without ever being in the same room while planning the event? The organizing team of trainers needed a solution to coordinate the design of their train-the-trainer course — something that would make the process of session planning easier and more natural; something that would provide synchronized collaborative work; something that would still feel like a creative process, with Post-it notes and flipcharts, but in a digital environment. Luckily, they discovered SessionLab, a tool designed for trainers and facilitators. It enabled their remote team to work together on the planning of training session agendas and…

75 essential workshop methods from Hyper Island (now in SessionLab library)

It is our pleasure to let you know that in the SessionLab library of facilitation methods you can now find and use methods from Hyper Island Toolbox - the toolbox that was most commonly mentioned by SessionLab users in the past year. Continue reading to find out how the Toolbox grew out of the vision of lifelong learning born in a bar. Nowadays when we graduate from the university and get our diplomas there is one thing we need to face as soon as possible: our learning journey does not stop when we throw our hats into the sky. To stay relevant in the job market and at our workplaces,…

Group vs team: What’s the difference?

I remember the first time I had to do a workshop for 30 or so bright-eyed students on the subject of teamwork. I had to explain the difference between a group and a team and how to form a group into a team. Up until this particular workshop what I have known about the group concept and the team concept could have been summed up like this: “a bunch of people coming together to do something.” Sure, it is not something you would put on a flipchart and call it a definition right? After some research, I realized I wasn’t entirely wrong.. but I was not right either. There is…

Thiagi methods now in SessionLab Library!

Learning by playing a game As children, it is so natural for us to play games. During these game-times we learn a lot of things, that affects our thinking, feeling and actions. Usually, these learning-by-doing moments happen unnoticed, thus naturally. However, as we grow up we forget about the importance of this special kind of learning setting. And to be honest, not every type of game is applicable to adult life right? I mean would you really kneel down and dug a tunnel in a sandbox? Fortunately, there are many other ways to bring back some playing into our lives! One of them is to start using more games in…

Multi-day agendas available in SessionLab

Ever since we released the first version of SessionLab, we received many requests to develop a better option to create multi-day agendas. It is a frequent scenario that a workshop or training session spans longer than a day, and previously the only option was to create two separate sessions for each day and then trying to manage them together in the multi-plan view. That was certainly a cumbersome way to deal with such sessions. We are happy to announce that support for multi-day agendas is now available in SessionLab! With the new feature, you can open separate days (day-sessions) under a session if you want to design a session that…

Introducing the new dashboard in SessionLab

Over the past months, we received a lot of suggestions about how to improve the dashboard, as it became harder and harder to have a good overview if you one many sessions created or shared with. Now we are happy to announce the new redesigned dashboard as the solution to always stay on top of what’s happening on your own or in your team’s workspace! What’s new there? 1) New views (Recent, Personal, Your Team) help you to find your sessions: you get an easy overview of what is in your Personal and in your Team workspaces. Besides, you can find a Recent view where you can always see your…

Liberating Structures now in SessionLab Library

Simple rules that make it easy to include and unleash everyone in shaping the future (or at least the next meeting) Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz sure had these kind of impressions and questions in their minds when they met in 2003 at Plexus Institute. They both had background in complexity science, improving organization’s workflow and learning methods. They shared a hunch that conventional structures (reports, presentations etc.) are too inhibiting while other techniques (brainstorming) are too loose. So building on a few methods they created Liberating Structures (the term itself is based on theory of power by William Torbert) that incorporates principles from complexity science, organizational development, improvisational arts,…

Rich text formatting, session activity indicator & library commenting ????P

We are happy to bring you the latest updates in SessionLab: Let your text become rich! - not only in content but also in format. Rich-text formatting is now available in the session planner, so you can apply bold, italic, underline and bullet point formatting in any section of your session blocks. Get to know in a glance if any of your sessions has been changed while you were away. If you work collaboratively on session plans, and your collaborators edit your session or make a comment while you are away, then an activity indicator ● will be shown on your homepage on the session card. Combine it with sorting…

Four-dimensional facilitation techniques

This is a guest post by Gwendolyn Kolfschoten. Gwendolyn is an expert on collaboration, facilitation and group processes. As a researcher at Delft University of Technology, department of Technology Policy and Management, she studied collaboration processes for a decade. She was also a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the Engineering Systems Division. She has published many academic articles on collaboration and on tools and technologies to support group work, among them four dimensional framework about developing facilitation techniques that this post is about. Currently, Gwendolyn is the founder a company dedicated to supporting effective collaboration and the author of the book Effective Collaboration. Like a real…

Find and organise your sessions better in faster-than-ever SessionLab

In this update we bring you a report on maintenance and some exciting teasers for the future. In the past weeks we’ve been busy improving the ‘behind the scenes’ part of SessionLab. As a result we got a faster and a more reliable platform than ever before. Of course, we included some new features as well that we know you’ve been looking forward to: Mark your client for each session: Now you have a dedicated field to enter a client of a specific session. This can help you filter your sessions and find the ones assigned to specific clients more easily. Less crowded dashboard: If you have a lot of…

Use own private libraries and share sessions with a link

We are excited to introduce you the latest updates in SessionLab. Your Private and Team Libraries of facilitation resources: Do you have some favourite methods or exercises that you often (re)use in your sessions? Now you can add them to your dedicated Private Library in SessionLab, so you can quickly find them next time you want to use them! If you work in a team, a new Team Library can be handy to have a shared knowledge base of facilitation methods within your team! Add resources to library from your sessions: Next time you feel you have just created a block in one of your session worthy to be saved…

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