Table of contents

• Enhancing Innovation Through Learning-Centric Workshop Design
• Rethinking the Purpose of Workshops
• Flexible Workshop Design: Layering Over Existing Frameworks
• The Role of Assessment Points in Workshop Design
• Moving Beyond Activity Selection in Workshop Design
• Conclusion: Transforming Workshops into Innovation Hubs
• FAQ: Enhancing Innovation in Workshop Design

Workshops have long been a staple in professional development, team building, and innovation. Yet, despite their widespread use, many workshops fall short of their potential. They often become sessions where information is merely presented rather than spaces where participants are truly engaged and inspired to innovate. The challenge lies in reimagining these workshops as environments that prioritize learning and foster innovation through collaboration.

To achieve this transformation, we need to shift our focus toward creating learning-centric workshops. This means designing sessions where every interaction, every activity, and every piece of content is geared towards encouraging participants to adopt a learning mindset. When participants are immersed in an environment that values learning as a core element, they become more open to exploring new ideas, integrating diverse perspectives, and collaborating in meaningful ways. This, in turn, leads to the kind of creative problem-solving and innovation that traditional workshops often fail to achieve.

In this blog, we will explore various strategies to design learning-centric workshops, emphasizing the importance of assessment points and purposeful activity selection. By embracing these approaches, facilitators can craft workshops that not only impart knowledge but also inspire participants to innovate, collaborate, and grow.

Enhancing Innovation Through Learning-Centric Workshop Design

The success of a workshop hinges on its ability to create a genuine learning environment. It’s not enough to simply gather participants and share information; the real value comes from fostering an environment where learning and innovation are at the forefront. This involves encouraging participants to move beyond merely sharing pre-formed ideas and instead engage deeply with one another’s perspectives, leading to the collaborative creation of new concepts.

The integration of learning science and facilitation techniques is crucial in achieving this. By embedding educational principles into the design of workshops, facilitators can create environments where participants are not just passive recipients of information but active learners who are eager to explore new ideas and innovate. This shift from a traditional content delivery approach to a learning-centric one leads to richer discussions, deeper engagement, and, ultimately, more innovative outcomes.

In a learning-centric workshop, the focus is on creating a space where participants can internalize, reflect on, and build upon shared knowledge. This approach is in stark contrast to the traditional model, where the primary goal is often to present information. By prioritizing learning, workshops become more than just a forum for exchanging ideas—they become dynamic environments where innovation can flourish, driven by the collaborative efforts of all participants.

Rethinking the Purpose of Workshops

The conventional view of workshops as content delivery sessions is increasingly outdated and does little to harness the true potential of these gatherings. Workshops should be dynamic, interactive environments where participants are actively engaged in experimentation, collaboration, and growth. This requires a fundamental shift from a presenter-centric model to one that is participant-driven, where the emphasis is on hands-on learning and meaningful interaction.

To design workshops that truly engage participants, facilitators must start with a clear understanding of the workshop’s purpose. By employing backward design, where the end goals are identified first, facilitators can better align the workshop’s activities with the needs and expectations of the participants. This approach transforms workshops from static presentations into experiences that are both informative and transformative, offering participants the opportunity to practice new skills, apply knowledge in real-world scenarios, and collaborate with others in a meaningful way.

The real value of a workshop lies in its ability to create an environment where participants are not just passive recipients of information but active contributors to their learning journey. When workshops are designed to be interactive and experiential, they become powerful tools for personal and professional development. By rethinking the purpose of workshops, we can create spaces where participants are truly engaged, challenged, and inspired to learn and grow.

Flexible Workshop Design: Layering Over Existing Frameworks

Designing a workshop can be a daunting task, especially when faced with the multitude of choices in terms of activities, tools, and frameworks. However, the inherent flexibility in workshop design is one of its greatest strengths. Instead of feeling confined to a single approach, facilitators can leverage this flexibility by layering workshop design elements over any existing conceptual framework, enhancing rather than replacing it.

Whether you’re working within a structured model like open-explorer-close or utilizing a different framework altogether, integrating key workshop design principles can enhance your approach. This integration allows for a tailored experience that meets the specific needs of participants while still adhering to the overall framework. For instance, by incorporating clear entry and exit strategies, conducting gap analyses, and establishing assessment points, facilitators can ensure that their workshops are not only structured but also adaptable to the needs of the participants.

This approach moves beyond the mere selection of activities, encouraging facilitators to focus on achieving desired outcomes and assessing progress along the way. By designing workshops with flexibility in mind, facilitators can create experiences that are both effective and responsive to the unique challenges and opportunities that arise during the session.

The Role of Assessment Points in Workshop Design

Assessment points are a crucial but often overlooked aspect of effective workshop design. These points act as markers or signposts that guide both facilitators and participants along the learning journey, ensuring that everyone stays on track and that learning objectives are being met. Unlike traditional evaluation methods, which often focus solely on the end of the workshop, assessment points are integrated throughout the process, providing ongoing feedback and allowing for real-time adjustments.

By establishing clear assessment points at various stages of the workshop, facilitators can monitor progress and stay attuned to the needs of the participants. This ongoing assessment enables facilitators to respond to challenges as they arise, ensuring that the workshop remains focused on its learning objectives. Whether participants are excelling or struggling, these checkpoints provide valuable insights that can inform the facilitator’s approach, helping to ensure that the workshop remains on course and that participants are achieving the desired outcomes.

Incorporating assessment points into workshop design is not just a best practice—it’s essential for creating an environment where learning is continuously nurtured and refined. This approach helps ensure that participants leave the workshop with a genuine sense of accomplishment, having met their learning goals and gained new skills and insights that they can apply in their professional lives.

Moving Beyond Activity Selection in Workshop Design

The selection of activities is often seen as one of the most challenging aspects of workshop design. However, focusing solely on the “what” of activity selection can lead to a disjointed and less effective workshop experience. Instead, facilitators should focus on the “why” and “how” of the activities they choose, ensuring that each one is aligned with the workshop’s overall goals and objectives.

When designing workshops, it’s essential to start with a deep understanding of the learning objectives, assessment points, and the participant journey. This understanding allows facilitators to move beyond the “spray and pray” approach, where activities are chosen at random in the hope that they will resonate with participants. Instead, facilitators can design a cohesive experience where each activity serves a specific purpose, contributes to the learning process, and helps participants reach the desired outcomes.

This mindful approach to workshop design not only enhances the quality of the workshop but also empowers facilitators to lead with confidence. By knowing that each element of their design is thoughtfully aligned with their goals, facilitators can create workshops that are engaging, effective, and impactful, providing participants with a meaningful learning experience that they can apply in their professional and personal lives.

Conclusion: Transforming Workshops into Innovation Hubs

Workshops hold immense potential as spaces for innovation and learning, yet this potential is often untapped due to outdated design approaches. By adopting a learning-centric approach, rethinking the purpose of workshops, and embracing flexibility and purpose in design, facilitators can transform workshops into dynamic environments that foster collaboration, creativity, and growth.

Incorporating assessment points throughout the workshop is crucial for ensuring that learning objectives are being met and that participants are engaged and progressing. Moving beyond the mere selection of activities to a more purposeful design approach allows for a more meaningful and impactful experience for all involved.

Ultimately, by transforming the way we design and facilitate workshops, we can unlock their full potential as spaces for innovation and learning. Participants can leave these sessions not only with new knowledge but also with the skills and mindsets needed to apply that knowledge in creative and innovative ways. By doing so, we can create workshops that are not just educational but transformative, serving as catalysts for innovation and growth.

FAQ: Enhancing Innovation in Workshop Design

Q: How can I ensure my workshop is learning-centric?
A: To ensure your workshop is learning-centric, focus on creating an environment that encourages participants to engage deeply with each other’s ideas. This can be achieved by integrating educational principles into your workshop design, which promotes collaboration and the exchange of diverse perspectives. By fostering a learning mindset, you create opportunities for meaningful interactions that lead to innovation and creative problem-solving.

Q: What is the importance of assessment points in workshops?
A: Assessment points are essential in guiding both facilitators and participants throughout the workshop. They act as checkpoints that ensure learning objectives are being met and allow for real-time adjustments based on participant progress. These points help maintain focus and direction, ensuring that participants are on track to achieve their learning goals and that the workshop remains aligned with its intended outcomes.

Q: How can I move beyond just selecting activities for my workshop?
A: Moving beyond activity selection involves focusing on the purpose and goals of your workshop. Instead of choosing activities randomly, design your workshop by understanding the overall learning objectives, participant needs, and the desired outcomes. This approach ensures that each activity serves a specific purpose and contributes to the learning process, creating a cohesive and impactful workshop experience. By aligning activities with your goals, you can lead your workshop with confidence, knowing that each element is thoughtfully designed to achieve meaningful results.

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In the world of workshops, success is often synonymous with preparation. As an experienced facilitator or a first-time organizer, you understand that selecting the right supplies for your upcoming workshop is not just about ticking items off a checklist. It’s about creating an environment that fosters engagement, learning, and productivity. In this blog post, we delve into the critical components of a well-stocked workshop and explore how choosing the appropriate materials can make all the difference in your event’s outcome. We’ll provide insights, tips, and recommendations on what to include in your workshop toolkit to ensure you and your participants are equipped to excel. So, let’s get started and set the stage for a memorable and fruitful workshop experience!

Each product listed is paired with an Amazon link so that you can purchase the item. If you like to purchase them all at the same time, you can purchase all the supplies from Amazon using the Voltage Control Workshop Supplies list.

Time Timer

Everybody loves the time timer. If you are like me, once you use it during your workshop, you’ll start using it for all types of meetings. I especially find it helpful for timeboxing broad discussions, and for creating time for individual work prior to making an important decision. There are a few different models and it is worth discussing the differences. The classic Time Timer has a hard plastic exterior and is available in 3″, 8″, & 12″ sizes. The 12″ is quite large and is best suited for larger workshops. If you are considering going smaller I would recommend the silicone exterior “mod” model. It is much more durable and it’s small size means that it is a bit more portable. None of the Time Timers come with batteries, so remember to buy batteries. Get 2 Time Timers; one to keep track of your current activity, and one to remind you
when to take a break

Post-it Notes

The 3×5 Post-it notes are the number one tool for capturing your thoughts during the workshop. Make sure to get the canary yellow as they provide the best contrast when reading from across the room. Make sure you buy the standard Post-its and not the “Pop-Up” that are arranged in an accordion pattern. If you get the “Pop-Up” variety you will end up writing upside down and they will flop down when you put them on the wall. Size matters, as the landscape perspective works perfectly when capturing big ideas with the larger markers. This combination helps you write just the right amount. Also, when sketching, the 3×5 Post-its work well as either a desktop display in landscape orientation or a mobile screen in portrait orientation.

Sometimes you may find that the 3 x 3 Post-it notes are needed in addition so you can get a little more playful with the colors.

Felt Tip Pens

These felt tips pens are a bit magical. Since people aren’t accustomed to using them, they seem to immediately illicit creativity. Perhaps this is also because we used pens like this early in our school days, when we were in art class. Regardless, these pens are great for the sketches, as they provide better contrast than ballpoint pens or pencils, allowing you to read from further away. They are also the ideal size, so you don’t write too much or too little.

Dry Erase Markers (Black, Red, & Green)

Dry Erase markers are used by the Facilitator or graphic recorder, if you have one, throughout the workshop to capture what’s happening in the room. The black ones are used for checklists and capturing main points. The red and green markers are handy when you want to embellish your map and other graphics. They can also be used in tallying votes, when not using the dot stickers, such as voting on your top workshop questions, or when conducting a note-and-vote.

Highlighters

After running numerous workshops, I’ve found highlighters to be a facilitator’s friend. I often have someone highlight copy that resonates with the team when we are reviewing sketches. This is handy during prototyping, as we can use this copy. I also recommend that new facilitators highlight relevant sections of the book that will help them remember critical elements in the heat of the moment. The highlighters can also be handy during sketching to help bring focus to specific notes you are most excited about, including in your sketch.

Sharpies

Sharpie markers are an indispensable tool in any workshop setting. Their vibrant, bold ink make them perfect for capturing participants’ attention and ensuring that key points or ideas stand out on flip charts or whiteboards. Additionally, Sharpie markers have a long-lasting, quick-drying formula that minimizes smudging, allowing for clear and legible notes throughout the session. By providing a versatile writing instrument that’s easy to see and read, even from a distance, Sharpie markers facilitate seamless communication, encourage collaboration, and help create a visually engaging learning environment for all participants.

ChromaLabels

Dot voting is probably my favorite thing about workshops. Whether it is the smaller dots and the team is marking the pieces that are compelling and exciting to them or the larger binding votings, the energy level in the room is elevating and infectious. Stick with the ChromaLabels. The Averys are tempting as they are less expensive, however, the ChromaLabels are easier to move, because the dispenser makes handling much easier, and the Avery stickers are difficult to remove from glass. You will need 3/4” (0.75) pink dots and 1/4″ (0.25) blue dots.

Printer Paper

Printer paper is mainly used for note-taking and for assembling your sketch. It’s always handy to have scratch paper around anyway, so make sure your printer isn’t running low or simply stock up.

Masking Tape

Get 1 roll of masking or painters tape for posting solution sketches on the walls. Some walls don’t play nice with post-it notes, so having this tape around to hold up notes can prove helpful.

Flip Charts

If you have limited whiteboard or wall space for post-its & sketches, flip charts can save the day. Consider getting 1 or 2 pads just in case you need them, they always seem to come in handy, especially if you can’t reserve the same room for the full week.

Webcam

If you are running remote interviews and need your candidate to see you, or running an in-person interview and need your observers to see your tester and the actions they are taking, don’t forget to get a webcam.

Rolling Dry Erase Board

If you are short on dry erase boards and wall space, consider a rolling dry erase board. Even when I have plenty of wall space, I love having a few of these boards on hand. It’s great to have the ability to move them from room to room or team to team. They also rotate, so you can have 2 different sets of content handy in the same place.

Dry erase paint can be handy if you don’t want to hang actual whiteboards, or want to cover more space without buying tons of whiteboards. Turn your wall into the whiteboard!

Pipe Cleaners

Pipe cleaners, though seemingly simple, can be a surprisingly effective tool for prototyping in a workshop setting. Their flexible, bendable nature allows participants to quickly create and manipulate shapes, representing various concepts or components of a design. By encouraging hands-on experimentation and iterative thinking, pipe cleaners promote a low-pressure environment for brainstorming, problem-solving, and visualizing ideas. As an inexpensive and readily available material, pipe cleaners enable facilitators to engage participants in a tactile, interactive way, fostering a creative and collaborative atmosphere that drives innovation and encourages out-of-the-box thinking.

Popsicle Sticks

Popsicle sticks are a versatile and cost-effective resource for prototyping in a workshop setting. Their sturdy, flat structure lends itself well to creating two-dimensional and three-dimensional models, allowing participants to rapidly test and iterate their ideas. Popsicle sticks can be easily cut, glued, or stacked, enabling a wide range of design possibilities for both structural and functional prototypes. By incorporating these unassuming materials into your workshop, you empower participants to engage in hands-on exploration, collaboration, and problem-solving. As they transform simple popsicle sticks into tangible representations of their ideas, workshop attendees can better communicate their concepts and refine their designs, ultimately enhancing the quality of their prototypes and the overall workshop experience.

Glue

Holding those prototypes together will need a little help from our old elementary school friend. The glue will assist participants in using their creativity. Glue sticks can also be a great alternative or add one.

3 x 5 Index Cards

Index cards play an indispensable role in prototyping and workshop innovation. They offer a flexible and tangible medium that encourages creative thinking, brainstorming, and collaboration. With their uniform size and shape, they are ideal for categorizing and organizing ideas, allowing participants to easily rearrange, group, and visualize thoughts in a dynamic and spatial way.

Rulers

When designing physical prototypes, rulers can provide accurate measurements to ensure elements are properly scaled and aligned, which is vital for functionality, usability, and aesthetic appeal.

Healthy Snacks

Last but not least, make sure that you have ordered snacks. You have to take care of the humans! In addition to making sure you have planned for daily lunches to arrive on time, have some snacks on hand so that the team can avoid becoming hangry. It is best to avoid sugar and excess carbs, instead, focus on protein and fiber. You may be tempted to get donuts, pastries, bagels, or other sweet treats to celebrate this great work you are doing, however, this will undermine your creativity and zap your energy. Instead, consider low sugar, protein-rich foods such as nuts, jerky, vegetables & hummus, fruit, low-fat yogurt, and protein bars (check the sugar content). Use these same guidelines when ordering lunch; consider salads or some other light fare.

Hopefully, this list of supplies helped you get a handle of the purpose and reasoning behind the recommended supplies. I’m confident that your workshops will run better if you buy the proper supplies, as I’ve seen it make it a difference in all of the workshops I’ve facilitated.

If you are interested in expanding your facilitation skills and gaining confidence needed to transform meetings, inspire innovation, drive collaboration, and lead change you may be interested in our Facilitation Certification Program.

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“The way we gather matters.” The opening line of Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering elegantly and succinctly sums up the focus of this book, which is jam-packed with useful and inspiring information for anyone who hosts events. As someone who facilitates design sprints and innovation workshops for a living, I found Parker’s book to be incredibly enlightening, and in reading it, I added more than a few new tools to my repertoire.

One of the things I appreciate about The Art of Gathering is that it comes from a different perspective than many of the books I’ve read on the subject; namely, her book is not rooted in the design or innovation spaces. Trained in group dialogue and conflict resolution, Parker comes at the topic with a broad definition of gatherings — they can be big or small, personal or public, casual or high-stakes.

This book is relevant not just to those working in start-ups or corporate settings but to anyone. From dinner parties and baby showers to family reunions and funerals, Parker tells us how to gather more effectively.

There are many practical takeaways from The Art of Gathering, but below, I share the seven that I’ll carry forward with me in my work as an innovation facilitator.

1. Have a Clear Purpose

One of the first things Parker writes about is that before you gather, you should be crystal clear about why you’re meeting. You may think you know why you’re meeting, but Parker says: “A category is not a purpose.” In other words, a purpose is not: “I’m getting married” or “I’m hosting a meeting about our new product release.”

Parker urges readers to get really specific about what they want to accomplish and achieve through a gathering. She says: “drill baby drill” — ask “why?” until you find an articulation of what you truly need to accomplish. By doing this, you will move from a “basic, boring purpose” to one that is “specific, unique, and disputable.”

“The purpose of your gathering is more than an inspiring concept. It is a tool, a filter that helps you determine all the details, grand and trivial.” — Priya Parker

Parker shares that when you have a good purpose, it helps you make better decisions. Your purpose is your “bouncer.” It lets you know what is right and wrong for your particular event.

2. It’s Not “The More, The Merrier”

After you have your specific purpose nailed down, deciding who should be at your gathering is the next order of business. Parker writes about the need to exclude people from events. It’s completely ok and even necessary, she says: “Thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering.” (This is a topic I often have to bring up with clients when planning design sprints; too many people lead to an ineffective sprint, so I’m always encouraging a limited and focused participant list.)

But, what’s wrong with over-including, if you can? Parker feels that overinclusion is a reflection that you don’t know and aren’t committed to your purpose. She urges those planning gatherings to ask themselves questions such as: Who fits and helps fulfill the purpose? Who threatens it? Who do I feel obliged to invite? Parker says we must be courageous enough to keep away our “Bobs” (the people we feel obliged to include). There’s nothing wrong with “Bobs,” but they don’t necessarily fulfill the event’s purpose.

“When I talk about generous exclusion, I am speaking of ways of bounding a gathering that allows diversity in it to be heightened and sharpened, rather than diluted in a hodgepodge of people.” — Priya Parker

3. Don’t Forget “The Chateau Principle”

Parker writes about something that I hold to be very true as well — where your gathering happens has a tremendous impact on the outcomes of the event. As Parker says: “venues come with scripts.” In other words, we will act more formally in a courtroom than in a meeting on a comfy couch.

“You should…seek a setting that embodies the reason for your convening. When a place embodies an idea, it brings a person’s body and whole being into the experience, not only their minds.” — Priya Parker

Parker calls this “The Chateau Principle,” which means you shouldn’t host a meeting in a chateau if you don’t want to “remind the French of their greatness.” (The name comes from a story she shares about an ill-fated corporate merger meeting that was hosted in a castle in France.)

Spaces embody the vibe we are going for in our gathering. The surroundings we choose for a meeting or party can make or break the mood, support or undermine our purpose, and encourage or discourage attendees to escape from their typical mindsets.

4. The Non-Chill Host

We often think it is ideal to be laid back and relaxed as a host of a gathering, but Parker reminds us that this is not the case. Guests want their host or facilitator to be in control of the event. As she puts it: “Who wants to sail on a skipperless ship?”

It’s more than ok to set up rules and keep to the agenda that you have set for a gathering. When you don’t steer the ship as the host, you create a vacuum for others to fill, and they might not do it in the way you want.

“A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confidenthand, but is run selflessly, for the sake of others.” — Priya Parker

Parker talks about “generous authority” as a guiding principle for hosts. It is a way to behave that protects, equalizes, and connects your guests. She suggests exuding what she calls “half-Egyptian and half-German authority” (inspired by a friend of hers), which combines the right balance of warmth and order during your gathering.

5. Pregame is Everything

Typically we think that events begin when they begin. Parker reminds us that events actually start long before: they are initiated in how guests are prepared for the gathering. According to Parker: “90% of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.” For example, you may take time to individually meet with stakeholders before a big meeting, or maybe you send an inspiring article to the attendees of an upcoming dinner party.

Parker shares helpful tidbits about how to positively “prime” your attendees before an event. It’s everything from how your name your gathering (is it a “lockdown” or “brainstorm”?) to how you greet attendees. and usher them into a gathering space. To illustrate the concept of ushering, she talked about the immersive theater experience Then She Fell, where the audience was seated in a small reception area and given a special elixir and a set of keys before entering the alternative world of the show.

Whatever you do, resist the urge to start your gathering with logistics and, instead, launch in a way that sets the tone for the rest of your time together.

6. Don’t Be Afraid of Heat

We’ve been told again and again not to talk about things like politics and religion during gatherings, but Parker has some contrary thinking here as well: “Good controversy can make a gathering matter more.” She feels that too much harmony can make an event dull. Furthermore, in shying away from difficult topics, you might not accomplish what you need to in your gathering.

“I bring good controversy to a gathering only when I believe some good can come out of it — enough good to outweigh the risks and harm.” — Priya Parker

Parker shared how she once encouraged well-mannered architects to dig into potentially controversial work topics. She designed a moment where the architects would have to participate in a virtual “cage match” to debate divergent strategies for the future of their firm. For Parker, “good controversy” can be just that, but it requires someone to design the structure and space for it to happen.

7. How to Say Goodbye

Finally, Parker urges us to think carefully about how our gatherings end so they don’t peter out with a whimper. “Close with a closing,” she says. She tells us never to start a meeting with logistics and we shouldn’t close with them either.

“A good and meaningful closing doesn’t conform to any particular rules or form. It’s something you have to build yourself, in keeping with the spirit of your gathering, in proportion to how big a deal you want to make of it.” — Priya Parker

She suggests a couple of natural ways to close an event. First, you can encourage the guests to make meaning and reflect on what happened. Second, you can have guests share how they are going to reenter the world with the new information they’ve received from the gathering. It’s about connecting our gatherings back to our daily lives. How can a piece of the event stay with attendees? Parker states: “Part of preparing guests for reentry is helping them find a thread to connect the world of the gathering to the world outside.”

Interested in experiencing professional facilitation at your next event? Voltage Control can train your leaders and teams on how to plan, organize, and execute meetings and events that are innovative and built to unlock potential and unleash everyone.

The post My Favorite Learnings from Priya Parker’s “The Art of Gathering” appeared first on Voltage Control.

Where you hold your Sprint is critical. Whether you are running a Design Sprint, Innovation Workshop, Visioning Session, or another type of workshop, your venue or space is part of the event’s success. When planning your next workshop, I recommend that you consider these seven things.

1. LOCATION

Location is often the first consideration. Start with any geographical or budgetary constraints. Often, we pick a location based on where the majority of the workshop participants reside in order to reduce travel costs.

However, it’s important not to settle for whatever rooms might be available at your office. Many offices lack spaces that are ideal for workshops, so we recommend that you consider remote offsite locations. The investment is worth it. Working offsite might be helpful to get people out of their typical mindset. A change of scenery can be helpful for some companies, especially environments entrenched in the status quo.

Sometimes, instead of prioritizing the budget, we have to consider the availability of resources. Is there a participant or expert that we really want to include in-person? Perhaps we want to co-locate with our target users so that we can do our interviews in person. The opportunity cost could easily eclipse any additional cost of an outside venue.

Pro Tip: Check out websites Peerspace and Breather to find great creative spaces to hold your Sprint!

2. SPACE

It might seem nit-picky, but you should carefully consider the details of the room itself. First, it can’t be too small! Choose a space that is big enough to accommodate all attendees at the table(s). Don’t forget that you need enough room to move around and huddle at the walls.

A good rule of thumb is to pull all the chairs out from under the table so there is just a bit of space from the seat of the chair to the table. Is there still enough room to walk past the chair? That’s the absolute smallest room you should accept! Make sure to select a room that can proportionately accommodate the expected number of participants while respecting their personal space.

Pro Tip: For a Design Sprint with seven people, we recommend a room no smaller than 12 x 20 ft.

To take a more scientific approach, consider Proxemics. Proxemics, the study of personal space and boundaries, can give you some quick rules of thumb. During a Sprint, where seven people are in a single room, everyone is operating for an entire workweek in the Personal Distance Zone, which ranges from 2–5 feet. This space is reserved for friends and family — people you know and trust. It’s an easy and relaxed space for talking, shaking hands, gesturing, and making faces.

3. ENVIRONMENT

Think about how the workshop space will make your participants feel. This isn’t touchy-feely stuff, it’s actually key to the success of your event. Is it conducive to focus and fun? Is the space pleasant to work in and free from distractions? Consider air quality, decor, lighting, and the general vibe of the space.

Windows are always nice so that folks don’t feel like they are locked in a closet all day. A room that gets natural light from a window is always a good bet. Fun fact—daylit environments are known to increase productivity! A related consideration is the room’s temperature. Make sure you can control the temperature of the room so people aren’t too hot or too cold. (Or, make a note of it, so you can tell participants to bring a sweater!)

Pro Tip: Music is a powerful way to make your environment more inviting. Bringing a small speaker so you can play appropriate tunes when people arrive, during breaks, or even during brainstorming sessions.

4. FURNITURE

Ideally, your venue comes equipped with all the furniture you’ll need. You’ll need at least one chair for every participant. But, you also don’t want too many chairs or superfluous furniture cluttering up space.

Look for rooms that have tables that are easily moved and can be configured into different arrangements depending on your activities. For example, do you need to be seated in one large group for brainstorming? Or, will you be breaking into smaller groups? In that case, you need tables that can be utilized for breakout teams.

Pro Tip: Factor in time before your workshop starts to rearrange the room and make it *just right* for your agenda and participants. You’ll need at leave 20–30 minutes and more than one person to help!

5. WALL SPACE & WHITEBOARDS

One of the most important features of a great workshop venue is space for creation. You absolutely need dedicated space for hanging ideas, posters and/or Post-its. Make sure there is enough space on the walls to pin or tape things or that there are plenty of whiteboards.

For Design Sprint and most other workshops, you typically need two large whiteboards or 3–5 small ones. If you can’t get whiteboards, the 3M flipcharts can work. If so, consider buying an easel stand or two so they have something to sit on.

Pro Tip: If you have walls to hang on, they should be smooth enough that Post-it notes will stick to them. Avoid the comedy of errors of constantly falling Post-its at all costs!

6. AV / TECH

Ask about the venue’s audio-visual features and make sure it covers your needs. Usually, you can get by with a TV or projector with HDMI, VGA, or Airplay, which is used for projecting your presentation.

Also, having WiFi is preferred, but you could get away without it. Although, your participants might not like it!

7. REFRESHMENTS

When you are looking at venues, think about where the participants will eat. Well-fed participants are happy participants! If you do not have a separate space for lunch, there should be room in your space to accommodate lunch. Have an additional table at the ready where you can lay out your lunch spread without disturbing your workspace.

Lastly, this might sound mundane, but be sure that there are adequate recycling, compost, and landfill containers for the team in the space. Bonus points if you can get the waste bins out of the room after lunch to prevent any distracting odors throughout the afternoon.

These are the criteria we use at Voltage Control when planning and facilitating Design Sprints and innovation workshops for our clients.

Pro-tip: with these considerations in mind, use our Workshop Design Canvas download to design your workshop like a learning experience pro.

Are you in need of a facilitator for your next meeting or workshop? We’re here to help. Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Let’s chat!

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Over the years Voltage Control has hosted various Liberating Structures immersion workshops. We hold these workshops as part of a series of Liberating Structures immersion workshops with a focus on scrum masters, agile coaches, and technology leaders. In this post, we’ll take you through what liberating structures are and how we ran a liberating structures immersion workshop in the past. Through our workshops, you will learn the principles behind why Liberating Structures work and experience specific structures that will allow you to tap into the room intelligence no matter how large the team. 

Our next Liberating Structures immersion workshop is scheduled for December 2021 – learn more and sign up here. We are also holding a mini-workshop on Liberating Structures foundations in November.

“It’s so fun to see people from a super wide range of domains connecting to one another and beginning to realize what’s possible if they begin to use Liberating Structures in their work all the time. New ways of working together really begin to open up and you can see how enlivened our everyday work can be.” — Anna Jackson, Liberating Structures Workshop Leader

What are Liberating Structures?

Let’s review Liberating Structures first. Liberating Structures is a framework created by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, intended to promote powerful ways to collaborate and engage everyone within a team and boost collaborative team interactions. Liberating Structures consists of 33 microstructures, which are a collection of exercises that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group. They provide simple rules that make participatory decision-making easier and are a solution to the dysfunctional format of most meetings, or what Lipmanowicz and McCandless refer to as “conventional microstructures.”

Conventional meeting microstructures are either too inhibiting (i.e. status reports/updates, managed discussions, presentations), or too loose and disorganized (i.e. open discussion and brainstorming). They often limit participation and the control is isolated to one individual or a select few–often the extroverted participants in the group. As a result, these conventional microstructures can routinely stifle inclusion and/or engagement. The Liberating Structures framework is built to encourage participation by including all team members–whether teams are in person, work in a virtual environment, or a hybrid one. 

Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop

A couple of years ago Voltage Control co-hosted a 2-day Liberating Structures immersion workshop with Anna at Native, an Austin modern hostel, kitchen, and bar. Liberating Structures had been quickly gaining popularity among the agile coach and scrum masters communities. In addition to Anna’s typical audience of health care, nonprofits, and government we thought it would be great to include these people from the technology world. While not exclusive to them, we designed with them in mind to ensure they would find exceptional value in the workshop.

We also brought in Amanda Bowman, a Liberating Structures practitioner that has extensive experience leading workshops with Anna, to assist in leading the workshop. Like Anna, Amanda is a skilled graphic recorder. They took turns illustrating as we all facilitated individual methods. Adding the visualization always makes an event more engaging and memorable.

The design team used Purpose to Practice, Liberating Structures Principles, and Design Storyboarding to guide our workshop structure. We met four times before the workshop to plan and prepare for the day.

Amanda kicked off day 1 with an Impromptu Networking followed by Douglas facilitating Appreciative Interviews and we wrapped the day with a tour of the Liberating Structures Principles. Day 2 started with Anna facilitating spiral journal and finished the day with everyone’s favorite, 25–10 Crowdsourcing. We also covered TRIZ, Discovery and Action Dialog, Conversation Cafe/What, So What, Now What, Troika, and Open Space led by Anna; 9 Whys, Design 101, What I Need From You led by Amanda; Ecocycle Planning and Critical Uncertainties led by Douglas.

Voltage Control feels strongly that Liberating Structures has an approach to address almost any challenge you may have to overcome. Therefore, we created a suite of free and interactive Liberating Structures templates for MURAL and Miro for the activities we use most often and hope you enjoy using them as much as we do.

During the workshop, Douglas facilitated the strategic methods. Strategic methods are exceptionally well-suited for technology companies or anyone that may face potential disruption. 

Critical Uncertainties and Ecocycle Planning are two of the more robust strategic planning tools in the Liberating Structures repertoire.

Critical Uncertainties

Critical Uncertainties is a tool that helps you to assess the ability of current strategies and build an ability to respond to changes in the future. First, you consider all of the critical and uncertain factors that you are currently facing or may face in the future. From this list, you’ll select the two most important and place them each on an x- & y-axis.

Once you have drawn your matrix, it is helpful to name and describe each quadrant. Once you’ve considered each quadrant, you can then begin to explore each quadrant to determine strategies that may work in those scenarios.

After working on each quadrant, go back and review all your strategies. Consider which strategies are hedging strategies and only work in a specific scenario or prepare you for those conditions and which strategies are robust strategies and will work in all or most situations?

This structure does not help you generate a plan. It is a tool for developing your strategic thinking and building the capacity to respond to and anticipate changes in your environment proactively.

Critical Uncertainties is a great fit for exploring what features to include in your product, planning and preparing for multi-country IT implementations, and executives creating or refining a 10-year strategic vision.

“The workshop helped me learn and practice some of the LS tools. I now understand enough to read about the other tools and apply them as well” — Michael Smith, Director of Orquestando

Ecocycle Planning

Ecocycle Planning helps you to contextualize aspects of the system that you are operating and allows you to scan for bottlenecks objectively. An Ecocycle is drawn as an infinity symbol with four phases and two traps identified. These phases help you to determine where various components of your systems or products in your portfolio exist within the ecosystem lifecycle. The four phases are birth, maturity, creative destruction, and renewal. The two traps are the rigidity trap and the poverty trap. The Ecocycle is a continuous loop and activities and projects can exist in one place on the map and quickly shift to another.

The front half of the loop, birth & maturity is how we typically think of projects. The back of the loop, creative destruction, and renewal, is often new to people. This is an important opportunity for teams to expand how they think of their portfolio or system. Activities can also exit the loop if you decide to end them. The two traps are also an opportunity for series exploration. We find ourselves in the rigidity trap when activity in maturity has become ineffective and we haven’t made requisite changes. Projects live in the poverty trap when we discover opportunities for re-birth and are not investing in the change.

Ecocycle is effective at prioritizing a backlog, balancing a product portfolio, discovering resources that can be repurposed, stepping back, and shedding light on situations where killing one project allows you to proceed on another.

When running an Ecocycle internally, you’ll invite your team to begin by listing out projects and initiatives that occupy their time. Then you’ll organize into groups of four and explore the placement of these activities onto the Ecocycle. After everyone has finished plotting on the Ecocycle, everyone shares and explores areas where there is a lack of consensus. Finally, the group discusses the next steps how they might respond to insights from the Ecocycle.

During the workshop, Douglas asked participants to consider various Facebook products and services and where they fall on the Ecocycle. He encouraged them to think of themselves as part of a focus group, and Facebook is asking them: “As a Facebook user, where do these features and capabilities live on the Ecocycle?” The following Facebook services were explored: Groups, Events, Messenger, Dating, Newsfeed, Security + Privacy, and Facebook Live.

“I found the strategies and techniques provided by the LS methods to be ideal for the groups where there are frequently power differences amongst participants. The LS methods substantially reduce that differential “— Andres Guariguata, LCSW

The Value of Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures have many useful applications in the innovation world, such as for Scrum or a Retrospective. Liberating Structures don’t need to be practiced in person – in fact, Liberating Structures are more important now than ever in today’s virtual environment and are great for optimal remote team communication. For more information on when to use Liberating Structures and solutions on using the best Liberating Structure for the job, download our guide here. 

For additional information and ways to use Liberating Structures, check out our Liberating Structures course where you will learn key Liberating Structures principles, practice 5 key design methods, chart a plan for further application of Liberating Structures and connect with a Liberating Structures community. You can also learn hands-on in real-time at one of our Liberating Structures workshops as discussed in this article: a deep-dive of Liberating Structures, when, and how to use them to unleash creativity in your meetings through maximum participation. And, as an extra bonus, you’ll also learn how to do this virtually!

The post Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop appeared first on Voltage Control.

If you are thinking about running a hybrid workshop, there’s a lot to consider. The hybrid landscape is a new frontier for event facilitators and attendees alike; therefore, putting on a hybrid workshop will require a different approach and mindset than an in-person or virtual one. It will also require alternative tools and methods to create an equal and engaging experience for all attendees–no matter if they’re in the physical workshop room or Zoom room. 

The priority of any workshop should be to engage participants and help them get the most out of their experience to make a lasting impact. Focusing on connection in a hybrid workshop is even more important as you must create an environment that bridges the two worlds and equally supports in-person and remote attendees. People come first. Everything else trickles down from there. With that being said, the right tools and processes are also essential for a hybrid workshop to exist. 

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Hybrid Workshop Tools & Processes 

The proper tools and processes are a critical component of hybrid workshops–both practically to run an event smoothly and strategically to bring all participants together. A hybrid environment is more complex than an in-person or virtual one; therefore, a hybrid workshop will also be. That’s because you have two different types of attendees to consider: those in the physical room and those dialing in virtually, and you want an equal experience for everyone. Prep will require much more time to adequately organize all attendees and set them up with everything they need to thrive. First, you’ll need to decide on the event platform that will support all of your workshop’s needs:

• Live streaming support
• Integrations that offer the highest production quality
• Networking capabilities that allow easy attendee engagement
• Management capacity to run the event smoothly behind the scenes

Then consider the scene from which you’ll run the event:

• Will you be on a stage with cameras to capture the experience?
• Will you be in an office and operate more like a typical video conferencing call?
• Decide the best scenario that supports the event–from the background to the props that will appear in the frame–then gather the materials you need to bring it to life. 

While tech and hardware are the lifelines that make a hybrid event possible, the biggest challenge with remote or hybrid work of any kind is genuine connection. It’s the essential missing element of in-person connection that cannot be replaced by technology–no matter how innovative. There is no substitute for human interaction. To provide the same fidelity of experience for both in-person and remote attendees, you’ll need a tool that supports collaboration, like the virtual tool MURAL. We personally like MURAL at Voltage Control because it’s a customizable virtual whiteboard that supports interactive and collaborative work with a distributed team. Everyone can work together in one visual space, and you can create your own templates to support your specific needs. It helps to bridge the gap between being apart and working together, no matter where you are. For this reason, it’s a great tool for hybrid workshops.

Pro-tip: Check out our MURAL Cheat Sheet for a quick reference of how to use MURAL.

One method to foster connection with distributed participants is to have everyone join the meeting the same way or work together in the same place. Have everyone join the meeting on their own devices via a video conferencing tool like Zoom. This creates a more even playing field for remote participants; when everyone joins the workshop in the same way, there is a smaller feeling of division. Having everyone use MURAL via their own devices to work together is also an effective way to create connection and community. All participants can see each other’s work in real-time no matter where they are physically. 

Once you have your decided tools and location, you must set up attendees before the workshop begins. Preparing attendees may include:

• In-person walkthroughs to set the scene and ready cameras
• Lighting and other production gear
• Virtual walkthroughs on the virtual event platform to teach remote attendees how to navigate the space

If the workshop requires attendees to have certain materials to participate, please send them out in advance. This will ensure all attendees are on the same page before the workshop begins.

Hybrid Distribution

Hand-in-hand with tools and processes is the distribution of attendees and how they’re configured. There are endless configuration possibilities for a hybrid workshop. Here are a few examples: 

• 2 in-person workshop spaces with 10 attendees in each, 1 facilitator in each; 5 remote attendees
• Facilitators are in person and all attendees are remote
• 1 in-person workshop space with 1 facilitator & 10 attendees; 10 remote attendees

Note that it’s just as important to consider the configuration of facilitators as it is for attendees. You must decide where you’ll need facilitators and how many. For example, as in the second configuration above, you could have three facilitators in the same physical room, all with specific jobs, to backchannel together while the participants are remote. This could be a cool experience to lead and navigate the workshop with co-facilitators in person. All facilitators would be on the same page, and the focus of connection would then be on creating an excellent experience for all remote attendees. 

You can also use the distribution of attendees to your advantage. For example, are people who need to be together already in the same room? In this case, a lot of the leg work is already done to foster connection amongst attendees. The people who need to be connected have the advantage of being physically together. You could even have a facilitator in each room to help the groups navigate the conversation/work. Then it’s about effectively communicating each distributed group’s work to the other groups.

While there are copious permutations, keep in mind that each one is unique and will require different considerations and approaches. We’ll never have an exhaustive list of every possible configuration. The important thing is that you consider:

• How are people distributed?
• How is the environment shaped?
• What issues might arise and how might that benefit you?

Hybrid Workshop Resources

In sum, when planning a hybrid workshop, map out:

1. How your attendees are distributed
2. Where facilitators will be and how many are required
3. How collaboration will flow
4. What tech is required to make it happen
5. How the environment is shaped
6. Your point(s) of engagement

Then, when it’s time to start thinking about the experience. Check out our Workshop Design Templates to help guide you through the process. You can also find more information about running effective hybrid workshops, meetings, and events (including more configurations) in our free Hybrid Work Guide. Interested in talking to us about how you can effectively run a hybrid meeting or event? Let’s chat.

The post Hybrid Workshops appeared first on Voltage Control.

Nobody wants to attend a meeting that’s boring, poorly-planned, or stressful. The key to any successful meeting begins with preparation. If you start with a good plan, you have better odds of a successful and focused meeting that your attendees will feel good about.

In the Harvard Business Review article, “How to Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting,” Roger Schwarz, organizational psychologist, speaker, and leadership team consultant, explained how vital the agenda is: “An effective agenda sets clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting. It helps team members prepare, allocates time wisely, quickly gets everyone on the same topic, and identifies when the discussion is complete. If problems still occur during the meeting, a well-designed agenda increases the team’s ability to effectively and quickly address them.”

We’d love to share with you the recipe for writing constructive agendas so that you can start having effective meetings today.

Six Ways to Create More Effective Agendas

1. Set Clear Objectives

Before you begin to piece together a meeting agenda, you must first clearly identify the objective of the meeting. Make sure you can clearly articulate WHY you are having this meeting and WHAT you need to accomplish by the end. Make your focus even more finite and identify if the purpose of addressing the objective is to inform, seek input for a decision, or receive help in making a decision. The angle will determine how you structure your agenda, and therefore your meeting. 

We follow a set of meeting mantras at Voltage Control to keep us from wasting precious time and resources at scheduled gatherings. Take a few moments to get clear on the big goal of your meeting and the objectives you need to meet by the end of it.

2. Focus on Essential Topics

Once you identify the purpose, it is time to begin agenda construction. Rule one of facilitation club is to help the group communicate as effectively as possible. One way to help this is by eliminating any topics or talking points that do not coincide with the purpose of the meeting and the goal of trying to be reached. 

Clearly define the essential topics, with each serving as a segment of the meeting. Arrange them in order of importance or relevance to create a natural flow as the meeting unfolds.

3. Set a Realistic Schedule

A robust agenda helps facilitation run smoothly and produce successful results. Take your meeting outline and assign each segment a specific time slot. Go with your instinct. This is a skill that will improve over time. If you don’t set time boxes around your activities, you can bet that you won’t get to everything on your list. However, this doesn’t mean you’re inflexible. For example, if a meaningful conversation happens and takes up more time than expected, check-in with the group, acknowledge that you’re going over, and figure out where to shave-off time later in the agenda.

If you are planning a more extended meeting, be sure to build in ample time for breaks. Keep in mind that the ideal meeting length is no longer than 60 minutes. Build these breaks into your plan at times when you think energy will be waning.

Finalize the timing by naming a start time and end time, then stick to them. With up to 55 million meetings held each day, and employees averaging six hours per week attending them, one of the top reasons so many people dread meetings is the fear of it being too long or running past the end time, cutting into their own work time. 

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When you build a reputation of ending meetings at the scheduled time, attendees are more likely to develop trust and increased liking to attending, which will boost morale and help productivity. Finishing on time is respecting everyone else’s time.

4. Work Collaboratively

If you are scheduling a long meeting, you might want to call in help. Two heads are better than one. Find a partner who can help you build the agenda and meeting activities collaboratively. Having an agenda partner also helps you stay on track–do they see something you don’t? You can more easily identify any holes or issues with the agenda when you have a second set of eyes.

5. Reflection Time

One of the commonly overlooked aspects of an effective meeting agenda is not making time to debrief. It is imperative that you schedule in time to reflect on what was discussed and decided on in the meeting 

Establish post-meeting tasks to bring the decision made in the meeting to life and keep the forward momentum going. Set clear deadlines for when these tasks need to be completed before the meeting is adjourned so that everyone knows what is expected of them, and steady and timely progress can be made.

6. Write it down

Once you’ve gotten your agenda where you want it, you’ll need to put your schedule down in words. Send them the plan beforehand. Doing so allows everyone the opportunity to look it over and consider what will be discussed and prepare before they enter the meeting, which improves meeting quality and discussion. You could also take a bit more time and use a template like these here to create a more detailed and professional looking agenda

It is also beneficial to hand out a physical copy of the agenda or display it on a projector if in-person, or send it in an email or share it on Zoom if virtual, from the start of the meeting. A visual reference present throughout the session helps to keep the group on task.

A meeting is only as strong as its agenda.

Need help designing your next big meeting?

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

The post A Recipe for Writing a More Effective Meeting Agenda appeared first on Voltage Control.

It’s almost been a year since the switch to digital meetings and workshops. Digital events like remote workshops aren’t always guaranteed to run smoothly. Whether the culprit is a technical glitch, a family member who needs your attention right when you’ve started delivering your perfectly-crafted speech, or a nosy pet who is determined to spend the entire workshop trying to jump on your keyboard, fostering a spirit of focus and connection in a virtual meeting or workshop can be a major challenge.

This doesn’t mean that any remote workshop is doomed to fail. In fact, with the right perspective and a little bit of work, your virtual workshop can provide all of the value and human connection of an in-person event. Read on to learn about how you can craft a remote workshop that makes its attendees feel calm, comfortable, and connected — and has all the benefits of meeting in person with none of the risks.

Preparation is Key

One major key to hosting a great remote workshop is preparation. Give yourself plenty of time to determine when and where your remote workshop will take place. Set yourself up for success by selecting the virtual platform you want to use for your remote workshop. Make sure you understand how it works, and get comfortable with its ins and outs. Consider selecting a backup platform in case you run into issues as the date of your remote workshop draws closer.

But don’t limit your preparation to just yourself. No one wants to get emails the morning of their workshop and find themselves scrambling to download a virtual tool. Send out plenty of information in advance to your attendees about how to access the workshop. Add an itinerary of what you’ll be doing, and any materials they might need. Take the time to plan your remote workshop in advance to ensure you are more focused on your team.

Get Involved

A good in-person workshop should leave its participants feeling excited, inspired, and connected with their fellow participants. So, there’s no reason why a remote workshop should be any different! Instead of spending each section of your remote workshop delivering presentations or leading rote Q&As, think outside the box. Let your teams engage in virtual design thinking exercises or spend time in assigned or randomly generated breakout rooms. Don’t be afraid to break up the monotony of an endless string of Zoom presentations!

Little things can make a difference, too! While you’re waiting for your remote workshop to start or you’re enjoying a brainstorming session, play some fun, energizing music to make your remote workshop feel like a more open and welcoming space. Making the attendees feel excited, inspired, and energized is a great way to turn a remote workshop into a success.

Be Flexible

It’s nearly been a year since we made the switch to virtual meetings. Additionally, it’s still true that remote workshops are often more exhausting than in-person workshops. Adjust for this truth instead of trying to fight it. Shorten your sessions to allow people to remain 100% focused for the entirety of each exercise. Also, add numerous short breaks throughout your daily itinerary that will allow attendees to grab snacks or stretch their legs.

It’s also smart to consider making changes based on your specific participants. Furthermore, think about what would work best for them. For example, a team of young professionals might prefer to power through a full day of a remote workshop. Whereas, parents juggling working from home with providing child care may prefer two days of shorter sessions. Implementing the schedule that works best for the team will make them feel seen, comfortable and respected. Also, this can mean that they’ll be more likely to be fully engaged during the entirety of the remote workshop.

Schedule Cleanup Time

Cleanup time is the perfect way to keep your virtual workshop from being too rigidly scheduled or too free-flowing. Like Goldilocks’ third bowl of porridge, it creates a perfect balance that will make your remote workshop feel “just right”. Scheduling cleanup time involves letting your workshop participants hang out and relax after the workshop is over. Instead of abruptly ending your Zoom session or moving onto another segment. Why take the time to hang? Well, not only is it great for capturing the magic of an in-person workshop and letting attendees connect with each other in a casual, low-pressure setting, but attendees may even feel comfortable enough in a more relaxed setting that they casually ask that question they were too afraid to ask in an earlier, more structured Q&A session.

Help keep cleanup time low-key by not listing it on the agenda. However, be sure to generate some ideas for a semi-structured activity in case people want to stick around but feel unsure of how to get to know each other. Having a fun icebreaker in your back pocket, asking a silly question, or even encouraging everyone to introduce their pets is a great way to foster connection — even when everyone is miles apart.

Don’t Forget to Debrief

With shutdowns being extended through at least the next few months, it’s possible that this won’t be the only remote workshop you ever run. An easy way to make your next remote workshop even better is to collect as much feedback as possible. Debriefing is a great way to figure out what your attendees liked and didn’t like, as well as to encourage them to provide suggestions for improvements. Consider incorporating a session dedicated to gathering and parsing feedback into your remote workshop, or follow up with a detailed survey or questionnaire after the remote workshop for your participants to fill out. Soliciting feedback can be stressful for even the most seasoned workshop coordinator but the information it provides can be helpful for bringing your future remote workshops to a whole new level of excellence.

Run Your Own Remote Workshop Successfully

Do you want to run a successful remote workshop but don’t know where to start? Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including live online workshops, boot camps, summits, and meetings. Please don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you have questions or would like to schedule a consultation.

The post How to Run a Successful Remote Workshop appeared first on Voltage Control.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

One of those speakers was John Fitch, the Chief Product Officer at Voltage Control and Co-author of Time Off.

 John spoke about the importance of rest in facilitation practices.

He presented on rest ethic and the importance it plays in the facilitation of culture. Through breathing activities, John demonstrated the ebb and flow of work and rest ethic and how to navigate and balance them in our own lives and professional practices.

Each inhale represented work ethic: how to get things done, execute, coordinate, manage, and fulfill tasks and duties.

Each exhale represented rest ethic: space for deep, internal work, expanded awareness, creativity, and time off. He explained that we need both ethics to avoid burnout and help individuals be effective facilitators for their companies.

John challenged the room to apply their rest ethic more in workshops and business culture.

Watch John Fitch’s talk “Rest Ethic in Facilitation Culture”:

Read the Transcript

John Fitch:

Sweet. So I’m sorry. You thought you were signing up for a facilitator summit, at least with my talk. Welcome to Workaholics Anonymous. I’m a recovering workaholic and this whole talk is around that topic. So everyone please stand. Let’s move those blood vessels.

And on a count of three, we’re going to take a deep breath. You’re going to hold your breath. So one, two, three. Deep inhale and hold. Okay. Hold as long as you possibly can. The moment you have to exhale, you sit down. This is a competition of sorts. Don’t feel bad if you have to exhale, but right now you’re holding. After you have to let it out, your exhale, just sit down. We’ll see who’s got the tightened lungs. Dang. Dang. Dang. Some of y’all are impressive.

We have some like Wim Hoff practitioners in here. Okay. Okay. Okay. Exhale. Exhale. Cool. Cool. Okay. Now real quick. We’re going to do like Solomon did this morning, a big inhale as a group.

Hold for three, two, one, group exhale. Ah, nice, nice. Good stuff. So that picture that I showed at the beginning was a moment in Greece that really changed my life where I had this epiphany that inhale and exhale is of course the duality of breath, yin yang with fung shui. I looked at it as inhale is our work ethic. exhale is our rest ethic and both are needed.

And our work ethic is where we get shit done. We coordinate, we manage, we email, we make, we fulfill and I’ve worked a lot in building AI applications. And most of these things about work ethic are being handed over to the machines, in my opinion, for the better, because what we don’t know how to automate and the genius of our humanity is in our rest ethic. It’s ideation, it’s human connection. It’s having that sudden epiphany. To Justin’s point. We don’t have ideas, ideas have us. And when we’re in a rested state, we’re an open channel.

So both of these are needed just like you have to inhale and you have to exhale. Very rarely do you have a perfect balance like this. For most people, this is what’s going on. For some people, they find a way to have an interesting back and forth on a micro sense of inhale, exhale, work ethic, rest ethic.

This is my preferred state. Very focused, deep work, expanded creativity and time off, which I consider the most important work actually. But the reality is most of us tend to forget the importance of the exhale and before we know it, boom, we’re burned out. Aside from that feeling real shitty, we can’t tap into the benefits of rest ethic. We can do all the hard work, but have nothing actually work.

Anyone read any of these books? Raise your hand. There’s some good ones up there. So again. So again, red background. These are books about work ethic, super important. All these work. Some of the methods I’ve even practiced, but then there’s a few books you can find, they’re hard to find that are around rest ethic, but there’s not enough of them.

So I spent the last year and a half adding to that part of Barnes and Noble. And it’s important because again, why are we burning out? It’s because we’re forgetting to exhale. We’re forgetting our rest ethic. In the book, we look at people throughout history and modern times that literally emphasize it’s a part, it’s their first step of strategy is leading with rest ethic. Brunello Cucinelli, half a billion dollar fashion, empire, 90 minute lunch, no emails after 5:30 PM. Cultural allowance for everyone in the company. Doing well and also making a significant amount of money that he calls it, investing in human dignity.

You’ve got ancient composers who went on forest walks and that’s where they were the open channel for the song and the supplies modern times. We have Terry Rudolph there at the bottom left. He’s one of the leading experts in quantum computing. Rest ethic was the first thing their entire company of scientists emphasized because he says, “If we’re just doing what everyone else is doing, how are we going to make ourselves different?”

So they have group runs. They go on off sites and go traveling together for the sake of traveling, knowing that the gift of it will be a breakthrough idea that’s going to push the way we handle computing. I want to make the point that just like these people, we all here in this room are facilitators of culture. That could be facilitators of our company’s culture about we handle vacation time or time off.

Also, when we are hosting people in a workshop, you facilitate that culture there too. Are you giving them enough breaks? Are you ending maybe what feels like a little too early? That might be the right thing so that they can show up the next day with enthusiasm. So first let’s discuss rest ethic. Who in the room finds rest through creating art of some kind? Please stand up.

Awesome. What do you make? What do you make?

Speaker 2:

I’m a gardener.

John Fitch:

You’re a gardener? What does that do for you?

Speaker 2:

Connects me to the earth and to possibility, growth.

John Fitch:

Teach me how to have a green thumb. I could use it.

Speaker 2:

Attention.

John Fitch:

Attention. Attention. Thank you. Thank you. Please take a seat. Stand if you’re someone who finds rest in sweating, getting the heart rate up. Awesome. Wendy, what does that do for you?

Wendy:

It gives me a sense of connection. Not only with others, sense of connection with others. Also just it taps into the neurons in your brain and body that allow you to feel more joy in the world.

John Fitch:

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Please sit again. You’re getting your squats in. So Chris doesn’t have to run around when you speak, just speak loud. Who takes forest baths? Stand up. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a Japanese term around just walking in nature aimlessly. Okay, great. What does that do for you?

Speaker 4:

Calms my heart, mind and soul.

John Fitch:

Calms your heart, mind and soul. Beautiful. Also leaves you smelling a little nice and natural. Please take a seat. My most favorite one is who shuts it down. You have some strict rules of when you turn the phone on airplane mode or you know when to end work and you really end work. Stand up if you know how to shut it down, that’s your way to find rest. Cam, why is that important? What happens when you do that?

Cam:

Communication is exhausting and I love just sitting down.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Thank you. Please take a seat. Who travels for inspiration? They make it a point to get out of town. Hank what does that do for you?

Hank:

I think a change of scenery allows you to kind of just see things in a different way so that when you go back to your usual surrounding, you [inaudible 00:08:34].

John Fitch:

Nice, nice. A new environment, new ideas, lovely. Stay seated, stay seated, please sit. All right, and stand up if you felt burned out lately. I’m like if I could stand up even more, I would. I’ve been more burned out than usual. You’re not alone. Even as a person who’s writing and thinking a lot about this, I still get burned out and thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that. But the good news is those who just stood up, you also stood up in some of the other categories, so you know what to do. Please take a seat.

 So what we’re going to do now is I’m going to play one of my favorite songs. And it’s just like, for me, channels some really awesome ideas. And what you’re going to do on a piece of paper is in two minutes, I want you to think about the thing that gives you the most rest. That’s the first part.

So maybe you take 30 seconds or a minute. You could draw that out. You could write it as a phrase. And then I want you to think about as a facilitator of culture, of workshops, of teams, of loved ones, how can you incorporate that more? Because you know the value of it. Does anyone have any clarifying questions about this task? Chris, play that song.

But I want to finish with an important question. Has anyone read this book? The Top Five Regrets Of The Dying by Bronnie Ware? So she worked in palliative care. This is a very powerful book. She’s helped guide thousands of people to their crossover, into the other realm. And there’s a lot of wisdom in this book. And one of the top five regrets of the dying is I wish I wouldn’t have worked so hard.

Time off. Exhale. Rest ethic can help with this, but the other four, it can help with as well. So you could have been true to yourself. The things that you just talked about at your table, that’s you. That’s really who you are. That’s your creative genius. Do more of that. It will feed into your work. You can catch up with others, have the human connection. The rest ethic is to not only help you as a facilitator not have regrets, but everyone that you facilitate, you don’t want them being case studies in this book.

They have the opportunity now to prevent that. Our book comes out next month. You can find more about it. We have a podcast too, timeoffbook.com as Daniel says, had to put out some shameless promo. Time Off literally works. One of my jobs is building products for facilitators. Control The Room is the summit. It’s now a product brand to build physical and digital tools for all of us in the room.

And we’ve been doing a lot of work on the digital side. Most of my background’s in software, no problem there, but when Douglas was like, “We need to make some physical products for people,” I was hitting my head against the wall, like where’s creativity? And my partner, Sarah, hey, gorgeous. She helps me not be a hypocrite.

 I’m guilty of only inhaling. And she’s really good at saying, “Hey, this weekend let’s have a tech Shabbat. Phones are off. Airplane mode. Away.” And when I did that, when I took that time off, I did things like catch up with Thich Nhat Hanh’s how to series. This great approachable Buddhist series on how to eat, how to walk, how to love, how to fight. And then I also tapped into my inner child and played with some Legos and built some stuff. And none of that felt like work.

But those two things combined allowed us to come up with one of our physical products series, which is the Control Of The Room handbook series, which is open to all facilitators to work with us so that less in a month’s time, you can take one of your methods and publish. If publishing a book’s intimidating, we’ve built a system to help you. And if it wasn’t for Time Off, I would not have done my job of coming up with some of our new physical products. So Time Off I think is some of the most important work that you will do.

Let’s keep it calm. Let’s exhale. More blue than red. It’s not a Crips, Blood thing, but inhale, exhale, but thank you. And thank you for also holding so much space all you speakers. Again, that was a big exhale last night was us all realizing we’re all just as flawed. We all deal with the same stuff. And I feel more confident as a facilitator just by holding space together and being able to know that there’s other people that have a shared experience and you all deserve rest. Don’t forget that. Thank you.

The post Rest Ethic in Facilitation Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

One of those speakers was Solomon Masala, the founder of the Source Consulting Group, a team-building organization that helps companies build skills experientially to change behavior by being directly involved in the learning process.

 Solomon spoke about his experimental approach and broke down the seven elements of operating experientially:

1. Objectives for skills: Skills that make your team better.
2. Practice behaviors: Be accountable for consciously practicing the actions that lead to success.
3. Total immersion: Be engaged via intellect, emotion, and physical immersion.
4. Doing the learning: Examine the access channels for learning.
5. Risk, failure, and safety: Failure is part of the experience, high perceived risk is a powerful way of engaging and should be inherent, but the emotional and physical safety should be ensured.
6. Wisdom gather: The debrief. The time to synthesize and analyze for relevant use in skill development and behavior change, and transfer the learning from the experience into the real world.
7. High fun potential: Keep it fun, but above all, keep it safe.

Watch Solomon Masala’s talk “The Seven Elements of Operating Experientially”:

Read the Transcript

Solomon:

Beautiful, thank you. Good morning.

Audience:

Good morning.

Solomon:

Speakers will often start off by saying something like, “It’s such a pleasure to be here. It’s such an honor to be here.” And I’ve mean it for real. I mean, I think about the group of people that I got to meet last night, all the speakers that you’re going to get to experience today and the amount of wisdom and capacity and heart and generosity of spirit was so truly inspiring. And I know that that’s what’s happening in the room here again today. So, to be able to be asked to be in front of you all, I intend that I’m able to share something that makes you feel like that was really worth my time. So, thank you all for coming and thank you for the opportunity. Let’s start off by having you do what I call a team breath. Without going into too much science, I just want to invite you to just take a deep breath. So, let’s do team breath.

Beautiful, we are embodied human beings. So, for anybody that is in this room, you have what’s called a central nervous system. That’s how you happen to be here this morning. And so, my experience of embodiment is part of what drives the work that I do. And for me, the word experiential takes it from just that sense of the head learning into the full body learning, which I feel allows us to have this depth of capacity. Things are moving without me. And I see here, what’s allows me to have this depth of capacity because of the neurological experience that I’m having as a human being. So, thank you, chair. Appreciate that. What I’d like you to do is turn your neighbor and say to them, “It’s great to be learning with you here today.”

Audience:

It’s great to be learning with you here today.

Solomon:

Thank you. I want you to turn to your other neighbor, and after you’ve gotten a name, at least. Are we working now? Beautiful. And turn to your other neighbor and say, “You’re going to get the best of me today.” So, in the spirit of what Douglas mentioned about conditioning, that’s the whole point of the sematic process, is I become who I practice being. What am I practicing in this moment, right? If I’m practicing that sense of generative connection with someone, I’m wiring and firing those neurons. If I’m practicing that sense of taking a breath and being able to come back into my genius mind, I’m wiring and firing those neurons.

So, I want to talk about what I call experiential evolved. Meaning, why are we doing this experiential stuff, right? It’s been around for a long time. It’s a way for people to engage trust falls, which I actually feel have some relevance somewhere, even though they get a bad rap these days, right? But it’s beyond just let’s do an activity. So, what I’d like to do is go through seven elements that I feel really bring the high points of why we want to bring experiential in and how to do it in a way that it actually impacts the people you’re working with in a generative way. Generative i.e., the opposite of degenerative. How can it bring that sense of thriving? How can it bring that sense of vitality in? How can it bring that sense of learning because we also have objectives that we need to bring when we’re working with our clients, cool? Let’s take a team breath.

So, the first thing is, when you design an experiential process, when you’re choosing whatever that activity is, it should support the people in the room in the experience in overtly practicing specific skills. It should surface very specific learning objectives. Now, that being said, one of my mentors is a gentleman named Carl Ronckys. If anybody’s here is familiar with experiential education, he’s just one of the godfathers of that. And there are times where you can do what’s called FUNN, F-U-N-N. This is based on what he says, functional understanding not necessary, right? And that’s when you’re doing what I consider a group builder experience. That’s just to get the neurology tuned, get people in the room, let the amygdala relax and say, “I’m safe amongst these human beings in this place.” When it comes to selecting the activity, though, it’s got to have very specific and focused learning objectives that emerged from the experience.

Secondly, when you design, what you want to do is ensure that the experience allows people to practice the behaviors that are part of that objective. Now, we know that because of the complexity of human beings, multiple behaviors are going to emerge, but you want to ensure that at least they can see overtly again, that behavior was something we kept working on in the process for it to move us forward in the experience.

Next, we move to then immersion. I love to do my best to create experiences in the activity process where the learners are so immersed in what it is that they’re doing, that they’re bringing their full self to the experience and sometimes have to even pull them back out and go, “Remember you guys, this is just an activity,” right? The more I can do that, the more what I’m doing is engaging the sematic elements of learning.

I’m also allowing them to pull who they really are into the mix so that we can talk about, okay, you all saw the behaviors that emerged there. What do we want to do about those? You all saw how we succeeded or didn’t succeed, or almost succeeded with that experience. We were all there. We saw what caused that. Now we can have a real substantial and robust conversation about what we need to do to shift that. So, immersion. There are so many elements of learning and what you see up here on the slide, when human beings are engaged in doing all of these things, learning is starting to come in at all the various channels. So, I’m a big fan of Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences. To me, I like to call those the access channels for learning. And so, if the experience that I’m creating allows the learners, the participants, to access various channels, it means I’m trying to at least cover the basis for how people are taking in information.

Let’s move to the next one. All right. It’s important in designing this to ensure that risk can happen in the process. And that failure is part of the experience. That being said, I want to make sure that it’s physically and emotionally as safe as possible. High perceived risk, by the way you all, is a powerful way to engage learning. Perceived risk, not actual risk, but perceived risk. When I can weave that into the experiential processes, and again, I call from the adventure learning elements of things. So, we have processes where people are standing up on just a cement brick. A cement brick’s only this tall, but when they’re in the middle of the experience, it’s like, “Oh man, whoa,” right? All of a sudden their behaviors that will be triggered in the real life experience emerge. We can then talk about them. We can then create interventions that the person can physically do inside their own mind and neurology. So, high perceived risk is a really great teacher in the process of creating experiencial modules.

Let’s move to the next one. In what we call the wisdom gathering. Most people call that the debrief. I always say the activity is only as good as the debrief. I can never assume that because they did the experience and I heard them talking about some stuff that the learning is present in the room. I’ve got to be a master or as much as possible endeavor to be a master at asking the right questions. And for me, those are open-ended questions. The how questions, the what questions, the why questions to help the learners, the participants, emerge. I did that behavior. Why and how did that impact the outcome? I did this particular behavior. Why and how did that impact the outcome? We watched the team do this as a group. Why did we do that? What else could we do instead?

All of those questions help to generate that sense of, I want to transfer the learning from the experience into the real world. This is again, one of the elements of experiential programming is, it’s not just, “Well, wasn’t that fun? We had a good time. We moved some energy in the room.” That’s great and how can we use the learning back out in my life? How can that happen? So, I want to ensure I do that by asking the right questions when we’re gathering that wisdom. Let’s take a team breath. All right. The last one then is how to create a sense of fun. It doesn’t always have to be fun you all and I’m okay with it not being fun, as long as I’m able to support the safety in the room. And that’s key because breakdowns might happen in the failure, and this is powerful learning for a group of individuals.

And so, if I’m able to, first of all, be comfortable with that if they fail, because part of what we’re going to do is gather that wisdom and then try it again in the process, then it’s okay. I just want to make sure, though that as much as possible, there is some element of fun, why? Because that does something to the amygdala that reminds me I can trust, I can connect and I can work with these individuals. Not guaranteed, but as much as possible, I want to have it in there.

All right. Let’s move to the next slide. Thank you so much for your help. I would like to have you turn and talk to your neighbor for about one minutes on all the stuff that I just talked too much about. All right, you got one minute turn and talk to your neighbor or neighbors. What’s sparking for you?

In keeping with the experiencial element of this, I had all kinds of ideas of what I was going to do with the group today, and then was very quickly informed that, “No Solomon, and you cannot take the group out into the lobby to do something,” which I totally understand. So, we are going to move forward with our activity, because if it’s experiential, we got to get experiential with it to see if I really stayed true to my seven pieces there of information. In a moment, what we’re going to do is dive into, these two are the goals and the goal and the objective that I have, right? So, I’m wanting, as I said, when I design an experience, here’s my goal. This is the first experience of the day. We want to have a sense of bringing some more connection to the group. Specifically, I’m wanting us to explore ways that communication will help us bring us together even more.

So, that’s my objective. So, now I got to create an experience that lifts and overtly allows us to practice those skills. Now, of course, I’m imposing this upon you, right? If I were working with a group, obviously that would emerge from what it is that they say they’re wanting, but I want to be true to that in the process. So, in order for us to do our activity, what’s going to happen is I’m going to have you get into groups of approximately 12 people. All right. So, hang on a second. When I say go, that’s, what’s going to happen. You’re going to get into a group of about 12 people. Probably, it’s going to be easier for you to gather around a table with your 12 folks. If you have 13, that’s totally fine, right?

You’re going to gather with those people around the table. Because we’re in the room that we’re going to be in and when I explain the activity in a moment, just be aware of your surroundings as you move through the process. There’s going to be a lot of movement happening, right? So, we’re taking good care of each other as we go. We’re about to explore. And this is actually the tool that I would have brought for token trading. So, I brought a bunch of them here today. We’re going to do an activity called moon ball. How many have heard of moon ball before? All right. In some way, you’ve probably engaged in moon ball.

When you get in your circle, your task is going to be to get the highest number of taps in a one minute time period. Let me explain what I mean by tap. That’s a tap. That’s a tap. That’s a tap. That’s a tap. Those are all taps. This is not a tap. That’s a catch. We’re not doing catches. We’re doing taps, right? Now, you have to tap to your team, your circle. I cannot tap like this, one, two, three, four, five. That doesn’t count nor can I go back and forth with the person next to me. One, two, three, four, five. That doesn’t count either. The ball has to be tapped by at least two other people before I can tap it again. What questions do you have about that rule?

Okay, it’s not the only time you can ask a question by the way. All right? Your task then will be to get the highest number of taps in a one minute time period. We will start off with a little bit of conversation before I ask for you to send the delegate here, to get a ball. Step one is going to be, we got to get into our circles of 12 to 13 people. Let’s start there, go.

Raise your hands once you are in a circle. Raise your hands. Beautiful, if you’re walking down the room without your hand raise, join one of these circles. Fabulous, all right. So, again, being aware that the balls might move, they might fall under tables, they might fall into another group’s experience, right? So, just being aware of our space as we go. Great. First step before we get the balls is I would like you to have a conversation in your group about what you feel you’re going to need in order to be most successful. What do you feel as a group, what do you feel as a team you’re going to need in order to be most successful? You’ve got about one minute, go.

Here’s something that I noticed. As I walked around and listened to the initial planning process that was happening, I was hearing a lot of strategy, tons of strategy. “We need to be closer. Your taps needs to be… No one said how high they need to be,” or “I can hold on to it while everybody taps it,” which is you can’t do. Sorry, it was a good idea. I love the creativity. I love the creativity that’s happening, or “We need to get close. What about the table?” I was hearing so much strategy, which tends to happen. Now, remember my objective is to create a sense of belonging. So, what I want to surface in this moment is, I didn’t hear anybody say if you hit it too far, it’s going to be all right. If you’re the one that misses it, don’t worry about it. No pressure. If you hit it way over, or you hit it twice, we’re not going to come down hard on you, right?

So, we talked a lot about the what we’re going to do, but not the how, the behaviors, which is so core to what we’re trying to do when we’re facilitating culture. And where do behaviors come from? The internal experience of me as a human being, right? So, I’m going to give you 30 more seconds to talk a little bit about your culture. How are we going to treat each other as we do the thing we’re going to do? You got 30 seconds, go.

That’s it, good. All right. So, we’re about to start. We’re about to start. So in a moment, not yet, when I say go, you’re going to send one of your team delegates over to the front, to get a ball. A couple of things I needed to clarify that I forgot to clarify. If the ball hits the ceiling and you can play it, play it. If the ball hits the table and you can play it, play it. If the ball hits the floor, it’s a dead ball. And you start again in that one minute time period, you might still have time to keep going, right? If it hits the floor, you start back again at zero. But you can play it off the table. You can play it off the ceiling. You can play it off the walls, cool? All right. When I say, go send a delegate over to get a ball. Go.

Let’s take a team breath. You have one minute, go. 30 seconds remaining. 30 seconds. All right. All right teams. When I say oh, you say, yeah. Oh?

Audience:

Yeah.

Solomon:

Oh?

Audience:

Yeah.

Solomon:

Let’s take a team breath. That was round one. That’s round one. All right, you got a certain score. And what I’m going to have you do at this point is let’s have a conversation. What are you learning? We just gathered some data. What are we learning? What are we learning? And what are we learning about how we’re creating more belonging in our process? We’re going to move into round two, round two. Let’s take a breath and go. Round two.

Beautifully done. Before we get to our last and final round, here’s what I’d like you to do. Choose three, I should say three people, three people from your team who are going to be delegates, who are going to go wisdom hunting. And what that means is they’re going to leave their circle while the circle continues to talk about strategy and behavior, and they’re going to go to other circles and find out, what are the best practices? What are you guys doing that’s working? What’s helping you? What’s supporting you in both culture and strategy in the process of it, right?

You can have about a minute to move around to as many teams to gather wisdom as you can, and then come back to your team for the final planning round before we do round three, all right? So, take a moment to choose three delegates and send those delegates out. Go for it, delegates. Move around the room. Gather wisdom.

You have about 10 more seconds. 10 seconds. Start heading back to your home team. Start heading back to your home team. And once you get back to your home team, start sharing what you learned. What did you gather? What wisdom did you gather? Last round. We’re starting with round three. Round three. You’ve got one minute and go. Five, four, three, two, and one. Hold the balls. Hold the balls. Hold the balls. All right. So, celebrate with your team in whatever way you want to. Celebrate with your team. Celebrate with your team however you want to and head on back to your tables.

How much wisdom is in a beach ball? My goodness. All right. So, let us take a big team breath. And let’s take a moment to just check in at your table. So, this is going to be table talk. What behaviors did you bring or you saw somebody else bring that created belonging through the communication process? How did you or somebody else communicate that you felt created a sense of belonging in your team? Go.

Let’s move on to another question. How could we, you in your team, personally, and as a team, how could you have created more belonging through communication? How could you have created perhaps more belonging through communication on your teams, go. One more round of table talk. How did this activity help you feel more of a sense of belonging or not in the group process? How did this activity help you feel more of a sense of belonging or not? Go for it. Thanking your table for the dialogue, and what questions, comments, concerns do you have as we wrap up my portion of this, the first experience of Control the Room, 2020.

Speaker 3:

You has the records?

Solomon:

Was waiting for that question to emerge, right? So, I see a number here. I see 225. So, one of the things that question surfaces is in the facilitation of this. You noticed not at any point did I say, “All right, let’s hear some scores.” I might do that. It depends on what my objective is. But my objective today was what? Belonging. So, if I start throwing scores and winning into the mix, all of a sudden that does something different to our physiology. So, that wasn’t important for me today. Of course, people are going to keep track of it though. That’s part of the coopetition piece that starts happening in the room, right? We want to stoke that up a little bit. All right. Thank you all so much for having me here this morning. I appreciate it. Looking forward to the learning with everybody. Thanks you all.

The post The Seven Elements of Operating Experientially appeared first on Voltage Control.