Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
sticky notes and markers.

Tag: Facilitation stories - page 2

We Facilitate: Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable – an interview with Martin Gilbraith, freelance facilitator

Facilitation can sometimes be a lonely profession. Whether you are a freelancer or part of an in-house team, you will often be one of only a few people practicing facilitation and who truly appreciates the value of facilitation techniques. As Martin Gilbraith, a facilitator with over 30 years of experience noted in our interview: “the vast majority of facilitators work alone or in very small teams and very small practices. Even those that work in big companies are generally the only in-house facilitator or one of a very small team. Mostly, what we do is pretty lonesome.” Learning from other facilitators and experts in the field can not only help…

We Facilitate: 20 facilitation tips to help you be a better facilitator with insight from Martin Gilbraith

Being a great facilitator is all about listening, learning and growing so that you can guide others towards achieving their goals. But how can you get started as a facilitator, and what resources are there to help you improve your facilitation techniques? In a series of interviews, we are speaking to expert facilitators and thinkers about their experience of facilitating, some of what they’ve learned, and the challenges they’ve faced. In this first interview, we spoke to freelance facilitator, trainer and consultant Martin Gilbraith on the subject of facilitation and got to thinking about some of the habits of effective facilitators and some of the insights that stuck out to…

How to design introvert-friendly workshops without frustrating extroverts? (With Examples)

Do you Talk to Think or do you Think to Talk? If we believe the statistics, roughly half of us belong to the first group and we tend to call them “extroverts”.[1] The other group, so-called “introverts” usually keep their thoughts to themselves until they have something valuable to say. In the business context, where most things seem to happen in fast motion, meeting time often runs out before introverts could rise to speak. How many ideas or concerns are we ignoring every day because the way we collaborate does not give voice to fifty per cent of the population? “The place of introverts in our culture today is very…

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…

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