Is facilitation part of your daily work? Mastering facilitation has taken on additional meaning as virtual work has become commonplace. The adjustment from in-person to hybrid or virtual work has shaken up communication practices. With most corporate roles, virtual work is inevitable. While your team may have settled into a new style of work, effective practices for virtual facilitation likely lag behind.

For many teams, learning environments have drastically shifted. So has the job of experienced facilitators. While confidence in conducting in-person programs and practices is essential, virtual facilitation requires a different approach. Facilitating virtual interaction takes as much preparation as does in-person. 

Want to learn how to become a skilled facilitator in today’s world of in-person and virtual work? Find a facilitator certification that teaches approaches for both. Even the most skilled facilitation experts cannot keep an advantage without revisiting how to translate their long-term practices into virtual methods. Below, you’ll learn why a virtual facilitator trainer certification enhances the outcome of workplace facilitations. Consider signing up for our upcoming Facilitator Certification.

What are Virtual Practices?

Virtual work not only means a shift in communication practices. It means a shift in methods to teaching and engaging participants, and considering added technology to the mix. 

For many teams, virtual work was implemented quickly with little time for consideration of best practices. Virtual work requires as much preparation as in-person, if not more.

With new technology come new methods of communication. Within virtual facilitation, the facilitator juggles a range of responsibilities: engaging in real-time and within chat rooms, presenting information verbally and visually, monitoring interest from participants, ensuring the technology is working properly, sticking to strict timelines, etc. Practice and preparation are essential for virtual facilitation. 

Technological issues often take center stage when facilitators fail to prepare in advance. Keep a meeting or class on track by preparing in advance and estimating expected engagement. Explore our Liberating Structures templates to enhance participatory decision-making.

In the case of virtual meetings, shorter is almost always better. Participants get weary of hours-long meetings, especially when their attention is to be kept through a screen.

Address New (Virtual) Challenges

Virtual training challenges facilitators to reassess best practices. Participant engagement is essential to successful virtual facilitation, and can often be challenging for experienced in-person facilitators. While the overarching goal is the same, delivery can and often should be much different. 

Mastering virtual dynamics within a certification program enables participants to test old and new methods. 

Without the ability to read body language, situational awareness has a new meaning. Facilitators have to find new ways to build camaraderie with participants. Introductions and communication boundaries must be presented warmly and clearly to successfully facilitate. A virtual facilitator trainer certification experience gives facilitators the opportunity to view various experiences through the lens of a participant or student. The importance of consistent engagement is often easily recognized from that perspective as well, as are effective methods for instilling participant confidence. Again, practice and preparation are essential for virtual facilitation. At Voltage Control, we focus on identifying methods and approaches for success (context considered), implementing methods to yield ideal outcomes, and reflecting on areas for improvement as individual facilitators. Explore this list for an extensive dive into core competencies for facilitators that we practice.

Master Facilitation More Broadly

Change is constant. A good facilitator relies on their experience to guide their chosen methods and approaches. A great facilitator considers context and welcomes changing dynamics as opportunities for progress. Collaborative relationships, virtual work, and changing technology are some of the most significant changes as of late, and they’ve all provided opportunities to facilitate differently. Effective facilitation embraces modern leadership.

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As a facilitator, it is essential to avoid copying and pasting an in-person approach to a virtual structure.  A facilitator must have a thoughtful, different approach to virtual facilitation. Facilitators play a neutral role, enabling collaborative environments by listening and allowing the others to develop their own ideas and solutions. 

A broader library of  methods to teaching and engaging participants must be a priority. A perk of virtual work is the ability for teammates to sit with their thoughts and ideas. As a facilitator, it’s your job to create an environment that brings those ideas to the table through effective communication methods. (Download our Facilitator’s Guide to Questions to keep participants engaged.)

That said, in-person skills are and will continue to be essential. Our approach to virtual facilitator trainer certification is thoughtful. While virtual facilitation is a priority for many, our approach to facilitation teaches skills for virtual and in-person dynamics. It’s important for facilitators to gain confidence for facilitating within both. Within both, a facilitator must prioritize preparation, clear communication, active listening, guiding the group, diffusing confrontation, and more.

Invest in More Than Meetings

You may question whether a virtual facilitation trainer certification is a wise use of resources (time, budget, etc.). The certification is achieved  following a collaborative experience with facilitation experts. 

A virtual facilitation trainer certification advances both the team and personal work. A virtual facilitator training certification yields productive growth for facilitators as teammates and individuals. In the program, facilitators study and discuss the foundation of effective facilitation, choose electives applicable to their work, then put learning into practice with other aspiring facilitators. 

Expect the following from our certification program: 

Poke holes in a current approach to push growth. 

Develop identity that broadens value as a teammate. 

Get real time feedback from others with similar experience and differing lenses.

Exercises are designed to have facilitators get to know themselves better: personal strengths, opportunities for improvement, and their long-term goals for facilitation. Professional facilitator portfolios are also a focus, enabling a leader to receive feedback from peers and prepare accordingly for future work. Facilitators will leave with the confidence to execute successfully in a range of dynamics, and will be an invaluable team asset where facilitation is necessary for productivity.

Looking to Get Certified?

Our virtual facilitator trainer certifications consider the scope of today’s reality: both in-person and virtual work. To better understand our approach, attend our weekly Facilitation Lab.

We invite you to attend our upcoming Facilitator Certification program, including a foundational phase, elective courses for personalized training, and a capstone immersive for developing long-term facilitator growth plans. You’ll receive feedback throughout the process, and leave confident in your skillset as a virtual facilitator..
We hope you’re excited to realize your potential and develop your identity as a facilitator. Our website and blog offer additional background, or you can contact us and we’ll respond promptly.

Looking for a Virtual Meeting Facilitator? We Can Help. 

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

The post The Difference Between Good and Great: Why Get Certified as a Facilitator? appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive.

Today’s story is with Tricia Conyers, founder of Island Inspirations Ltd., remote work facilitator, and learning experience designer out of Trinidad and Tobago.

I spoke with Tricia about her Learning meeting, the reason behind it, and how she imagines her meeting changing in the future.

An Emergent Learning Space

Tricia first started this particular meeting several years ago as a monthly session designed for people moving to Trinidad from different countries. Dubbing her sessions the “Learning” meeting, she designs these gatherings to help businesses shift to a more human-centered mindset in the workplace. Tricia’s goal for her monthly meetings is to help her clients and their team learn from a diverse group of people and different perspectives.

Each month, Tricia makes an effort to further shape her client’s company culture by bringing people together to discuss and ideate around the year’s overarching arc as well as a singular monthly question. Though the meeting originally began as a day-long session, during COVID-19, the meetings transitioned to online-only with hour-long sessions each month. 

In Tricia’s efforts to encourage discourse and increase flexibility in her meetings, she relies on platforms that spark creativity to help explore the main questions. In addition to prioritizing experiential learning, Tricia aims to increase connectivity among her team members in these Learning sessions. 

Let’s take a closer look at Tricia’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Learning meeting, the main goal is to strengthen trust among team members and encourage an open-minded approach to learning.

Preparation

To set the tone for an effective learning experience, Tricia spends a significant amount of time on preparation. With the help of a small design team, Tricia shapes the year’s curriculum and the breakdown for the following months.

To prepare for a learning meeting, the facilitator will select the question by month and determine how participants will explore the monthly question throughout each meeting. 

In a Learning meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: Held virtually on Zoom

• Participants:
  • 14 – 20 attendees
  • Facilitator
  • Tech host

Tools:

• Mural 
• Zoom
• Google Maps
• Jam Board
• Drawing apps

Deliverables:

• A stronger connection with team members
• An answer to the monthly question

As Tricia holds this meeting on a monthly basis, the participants change month to month. Typically, 15 – 20 people are part of this monthly meeting.

Plan the Workshop

• Length of time: One hour

Activities:

• Storyboarding
• Drawing

Agenda:

• Beginning
  • Introduce the concept
• Middle
  • Form breakout groups, pairs, or triads
• End
  • Reinforce the culture of connectedness
  • Identify next steps

Before the Meeting

Preparation

As the Learning meeting is a recurring, monthly session, the preparation begins with preparing a curriculum for the entire year. This curriculum centers around an overarching question that drives the process of learning and growth in an organization.

Tricia likes to split the preparation into short-, medium-, and long-term preparation. In the preparation for this particular meeting, Tricia focused on designing a structure or flow of the meeting that allows for constant discourse throughout the year. Based on the overarching question, Tricia breaks the rest of the meeting’s curriculum into various monthly topics that will further the overarching aims and encourage increased engagement amongst participants.

Tricia then works with her design team and tech host to make sure the Zoom meeting flows seamlessly with the apps and other software used.

Beginning

The facilitator begins the Learning meeting by asking everyone to embrace the space and to share their experiences. To encourage the free-flowing exchange of ideas, the facilitator asks participants to bring their best selves into the meeting and to see what emerges. 

At the beginning of each monthly session of a Learning meeting, Tricia sets the tone by considering questions such as:

• What is the cultural impact that we want to have? 
• How do we want to shape this? 
• What is it that we want to do for people? 
• What values of the organization does this reinforce?
•  How can we make sure that we bring that in?

In this Learning meeting, Tricia worked with team members from across North America with connection and learning as the main deliverables for the session. Though the preparation process is quite heavy-handed, Tricia likes to approach her meetings with a loose structure. This way, she can allow for more of the unexpected as she creates a culture of connectedness through open discussion and ideation.

While the Learning sessions differ from the structured setting of a traditional meeting, the main aim is to free participants from the confinements and expectations that come with following strict guidelines. 

“There’s a lot of flexibility in adapting and seeing where the group wants to go with this in terms of exploring and learning… Being able to respond to that has left the people who want more structure…feeling a bit uncomfortable… And I think they’ve had to learn to try and embrace that over the years.”

With the flexibility in the structure of the meeting comes growth and the ability to improve connection, communication, and understanding amongst team members.

Middle

The middle of the session opens the space even more to encourage increased ideation, more connectedness, and greater flexibility. The facilitator works to create an emergent learning space by forming breakout groups of two, three, or more people to encourage discussion and collaborative problem-solving. 

In this phase of the meeting, Tricia uses technology to support the free form ideation process. She encourages participants to focus on the cultural impact of their ideas as they work together. Using Software like Jam Board and drawing apps, she encourages participants to storyboard their thoughts and ideas. During this phase, Trica splits team members into groups of two, three, or more to encourage further discussion, foster deeper relationships, and center connections in the company culture.

While the monthly nature of this meeting is beneficial to strengthening connectedness, Tricia points out that it presents a potential risk that facilitators should keep in mind: 

“As new people join the business throughout the year, they come into these sessions without having some of the experience of what’s happened before…It means you have to think about…how do you constantly create an environment where they can feel welcomed into a conversation that in essence has already started.”

End

As the meeting comes to a close, the facilitator should assess if the deliverables are achieved. Facilitators can prepare participants for the next month’s discussion.   

Towards the end of the session, Tricia makes an effort to improve the meeting for the following months. With the overarching topic in mind, it’s important that she continues the same rhythm of creativity and innovation in the next sessions. Tricia points out that having a recurring session with the same participants throughout the year gives her the opportunity to refine her approach to facilitation:

“In a monthly meeting like this…there are 12 opportunities to make changes and to get it right…Or to keep changing things and to try and make it better each time.”

Shifting the Culture

Essentially, this Learning meeting is designed to create a culture of openness and connection among organizations on a regular basis. Going forward, Tricia may take the Learning meetings in an even more emergent direction. Instead of focusing on a learning session, Tricia hopes to create a learning council. Meeting participants will bring a challenge to the council that they explore as a group with a more human-centered problem-solving session as the main deliverable.

With the idea of fostering more emergent sessions in mind, Tricia shared what is successful about her current Learning meeting model. 

“The risk of the session is that you leave people feeling frustrated about the unexpected “emergent space” of the meeting… but things change and we actually allow for that immersion.”

“When we take time to think about how we want this meeting to help shape the culture of the organization, when we take time to frame it through that lens, and through that question, we can make really great things happen.
Meetings are when we bring people together, they’re when stories emerge and that’s when we help to shape the culture that people feel in the organization.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post The Learning Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

Facilitating Virtual Meetings is top-of-mind for more people than ever as we shift towards remote work. There are ever-increasing norms for virtual meetings; many companies, teams, and facilitators have been practicing the art of virtual meetings for a while now, and with that practice, we are developing norms for virtual meetings that we feel facilitators and attendees alike should be privy too.

Facilitating virtual meetings and the skills required to keep your team engaged and unleashed are more urgent than ever. Your run-of-the-mill, straightforward meetings like team standups or weekly check-ins might not require extra planning or heavy facilitation. On the other hand, if you are hosting a Design Sprint, Team Alignment, or innovation workshop over video conferencing, you’ll want to take more time preparing and put additional thought into your agenda and methods.

The new norms for virtual meetings are important to facilitating successful, and productive virtual interactions.

1. Build a Hyper-Realistic (Read: Shorter) Agenda

If there is one thing we’ve learned at Voltage Control through facilitating virtual meetings, it’s that you can’t simply transfer an in-person meeting agenda to a remote meeting. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. You’ll need to adjust your meeting agenda specifically to the virtual space.  

For example, if you were leading an in-person ideation workshop with team members in a single location, you might plan on spending the whole day together. Yet, expecting these same people to sit on an eight-hour video call for a remote meeting is unrealistic. It’s unrealistic under normal circumstances, so it’s bordering on crazy when many people are juggling kids, partners, and spouses also at home.

Therefore, when planning a remote meeting agenda, scale down expectations on how much time participants will invest. No more than 2 to 4 hours in one day is a good limit. 

Shorter virtual meetings mean that your session might have to stretch over multiple days, but this new virtual meeting norm will help prevent meeting fatigue and generate more productive meetings.

2. Create Homework and Group Work

One way to compensate for a shorter meeting is to move some of your exercises or activities to homework or group work. For example, if you want to review a report as a group, consider shifting a formal presentation out of your virtual meeting. Instead, have participants read the report as pre-work. You could even fold this into your icebreaker: have every participant come to the meeting prepared to share a top learning from their pre-work. 

Another way to facilitate virtual meetings is to assign group work. Instead of making people stay on one call with a large group for hours at a time, split into small groups to complete a certain task or exercise. 

These small groups can then work via Slack, email, or smaller video calls to complete their assignment. Another benefit of group work is that you can cover more ground; for example, you can brainstorm around three opportunity areas or topics instead of just one.

3. Break Things Down into Bite-Sized Bits

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Another factor to consider as a facilitator, is how to keep momentum and interest high during your virtual meeting. Long stretches of time listening to presentations will lead participants to check-out. In remote meetings, it’s especially critical to break your activities into small chunks. 

So, if your agenda is simply three activities taking place in hour-long blocks, we urge you to get more granular. Break each hour down into smaller moments that include time for presentation, conversation, and questions, for example. 

These compressed bits of time will keep your participants engaged and on their toes. Just as you want your virtual meeting to be capped at no more than four hours, think about your meeting activities in terms of  5-20 minute blocks of time to keep everyone interested while they’re on phone or video.

4. Set Clear Expectations & Ground Rules Ahead of Time

Another consideration for positive virtual meetings is to set expectations before the session starts. You could say that the foundation for a successful virtual session is created days, even weeks, ahead of time. 

Make sure that participants come into the session with a crystal-clear idea of what to expect. This means more than sending out a basic email with an agenda one hour before the meeting. Send a few messages to your participants in the lead-up to the session. 

Here are some things to include: 

• Introduce yourself: This is mandatory if you’re new to the group. Include a picture of yourself, a short bio, and maybe a fun fact to build virtual rapport and connection.
• Outline the session: Give people an overview of the day. You don’t need to go into the nitty-gritty schedule, but outline the major activities, break times, etc.
• Set expectations: Let people know how you want them to behave (i.e one speaker at a time) and outline any ground rules.
• Get people excited: Explain why this meeting is important and what participants will contribute and/or get out of it.
• Assign any homework: Give participants enough time to complete their pre-work and don’t forget to send at least one reminder!

Introduce the tools: Make sure everyone knows what tools (i.e. Zoom, MURAL, Miro) will be used on the call so they can download any programs ahead of time.

5. Limit the Number of Tools 

A new facilitation norm to consider, especially if you are new to remote meeting facilitation: keep it simple. Don’t overcomplicate your meeting. Protect your sanity and the patience of the participants by limiting the number of different tools you use during your call.

Yes, there are tons of cool ways to engage people virtually today, whether it’s a digital whiteboard or a polling/voting program. But you shouldn’t try them all at once. Each new program or tool comes with potential technical difficulties and learning curves. 

We’d recommend incorporating just one supplemental tool in your call in addition to the video conferencing software. Keep the complexity low and you’ll feel more in control of your meeting and have less frustration from participants. If you absolutely have to use multiple tools in your meeting, be sure to build-in extra time for transitions and technical issues.

6. Sprinkle in Elements of Fun or Surprise

So many people are on video calls all day right now, so expect that your participants will be fatigued. Think of ways to add the unexpected to your virtual meeting to make it more fun for participants. 

Go beyond just planning an opening icebreaker; inject thought-provoking or amusing elements throughout your session to keep participants involved and on-their-toes. 

Some potential ideas for “spicing up” your agenda:

• Start the meeting with a funny and or inspirational video that’s related to your topic. 
• Sprinkle your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation with funny GIFs or memes to support the headline or main idea.
• Create moments for participants to stretch or do a quick yoga or breathing exercise as a group. 
• Create a special playlist and play it as people “arrive” to the virtual meeting. Share the playlist afterward in a thank you/wrap up email.

Check it out: If you want to dive deeper into remote facilitation, MURAL (one of our favorite digital collaboration tools) has literally written a free ebook on the topic. 

Looking for a Virtual Meeting Facilitator? We Can Help. 

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

The post Facilitating Virtual Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Today’s story is with Moe Ali, a facilitator, service designer, and creative human enabler based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

I spoke with Moe about the Balcony Bunch meeting, the reason behind it, and what risks he encountered. 

A Meeting in Motion

Moe started the Balcony Bunch as a meeting designed to connect otherwise disconnected creatives in Dubai. The idea for this meeting is that it starts as a guided walk through the streets and parks, ending where attendees sit at a balcony for the rest of the meeting. 

Moe was inspired by The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker to create a meeting that would establish deeper roots with his fellow creatives. The Art of Gathering teaches facilitators how to create high-powered gatherings that move beyond the mundane to meetings that matter. 

Moe created the Balcony Bunch for creatives living in Dubai for longer than ten years as a way to grow deeper relationships. In Dubai, building relationships that span months or years is incredibly challenging due to the city’s transitory nature. Moe discovered that many creatives were no longer incentivized to meet new people so he designed the Balcony Bunch as an opportunity to soften hearts and awaken minds to true community. 

Let’s take a closer look at Moe’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Balcony Bunch meeting, the main goal is to generate trust and build real connections and genuine relationships by breaking the superficial barriers of roles and titles by asking participants “How do you do?” rather than “What do you do?”

Preparation Guidelines

• No phone calls, no data 
• Understand the prompts beforehand
• Wear comfortable walking shoes

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: Held outdoors 

• Participants: Eight people hoping to deepen their relationships
• Supplies: Food and drinks for the balcony

Tools:

• Google docs
• Text messages
• Google Maps

Deliverables:

• Deeper relationships between like-minded people
• Shared empathy amongst participants

In this particular meeting, Moe invited eight like-minded creatives that had been living in Dubai for 10 years or more.

Plan the Workshop

• Length of time: Approximately two hours

Activities:

• Finding the location
• Meditation and visualization
• Following the guided path
• Popcorn style discussion

Agenda:

• The Location
  • Meditation and visualization
    
• The First Prompt (Past)
  • Walking conversation 
  • Debriefing
    
• Reconvening
  • Debriefing

• The Second Prompt (Future)
• Debriefing

Before the Meeting

The facilitator may contact the participants ahead of time to set the tone for the meeting. Moe asked questions such as:

• Who would you like to attend? 
• What would you like them to walk away with? 
• What would make you happy? 

These prompts help attendees keep in mind that they’re participating in someone else’s happiness and helping them walk away with something of value.

The Location

Location plays a large role in the Balcony Bunch. Having the location be part of the meeting gives the attendees a sense of purpose and curiosity.

In Moe’s session, he sends participants a location via Google Maps where they all gather to meet. Before starting the meeting, he asks participants to sit in silence as they meditate by a fountain. At this time, a breathing exercise serves as a meditative and mindful practice while the others arrived. 

Once all participants arrived, Moe asked them to visualize everything they had experienced in the past year. After the brief visualization, Moe paired everyone up to begin the walking phase of the meeting.  

The First Prompt

Participants begin their walking conversations as they answer the first prompt, discussing what they experienced in the past year. The guided path serves as a way for participants to focus completely on their partner’s answers. As the facilitator leads the way, participants discuss the prompt from the first phase and recount the experiences from the last year.

In the walking conversation, Moe encouraged participants to move beyond discussing roles. 

“I always feel that the worst way to get people to talk to each other is by introducing work, or labels related to the work that people do because people always end up talking about the things that excite them if given the chance.”

By having participants share their experiences from the past year, they were able to “widen the net” and have a truly human experience.

Reconvening

In a secluded area like a balcony or a garden, the facilitator brings the pairs back together to reconvene and find patterns in their experiences over food and drinks.

In Moe’s meeting, he walked his group to a secluded garden area, near a reflecting pool. Moe used water throughout his meeting as a point of inflection and reflection as he asked participants what they noticed on their walk.

Participants shared what they discussed in a popcorn-style conversation while Moe weaved each person’s responses into other attendees’ answers. Moe noted who would perk up and show empathy in their body language and facial expressions as patterns emerged within each person’s story.

The Second Prompt

The second prompt acts as a way to bond two people in their shared vulnerability. After the first conversation closes, the facilitator introduces the second prompt with questions like:

• What are you looking forward to creating over the coming year?
• What do you want to invite?
• What are you moving towards that you would like to bring into being this year?

After sharing these questions with the group, Moe paired partners that showed the most empathy to each other’s stories. The goal of this pairing was to allow each person in the conversation to feel heard and seen. 

As each partner showed some level of empathy for the other, answering questions about their hopes and goals for the future was an effective way to create an incredible bond in just a few hours. As Moe shares, “The ties that bind were fairly thin. However, they got thicker by the end of the evening. And I think what was unique about this. Strangers coming together and within that hour and a half, they were relating to each other in a way that they hadn’t before.”

Lighting a Cerebral Fire 

The Balcony Bunch serves as an unconventional meeting that taps into the magic of human emotion and shared experiences. Having a meeting in motion allows for a certain physicality that helps participants get out of their heads and into the moment. 

Likewise, by negating the roles and work responsibilities of each person, attendees can see the humanity in one another, allowing for a level of vulnerability usually not seen in the workplace.

When asked about the potential pitfalls of this meeting style, Moe pointed out that running this type of session may be too risky for a typical work environment. To truly create this type of meeting with the potential pitfalls in mind, it’s important to find the space between the high risk, high reward setting of a retreat and the laid-back familiar environment of a post-work mixer. 

By finding the space in between, facilitators can create an intentional environment that encourages authentic connection. Though this space is hard to navigate, Moe believes it’s worth the risk:

“Now, keep in mind, I’ve only done this a few times. I haven’t done it in a way that I’ve been able to track any sort of metrics. The only metric I have is the sentiment from the people. If I were to ask them now three years later about this meeting, they’d be like, “Oh yeah, I remember the Balcony Bunch. Yeah, that was great.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post The Balcony Bunch appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Today’s story is with David Plouffe, a heritage planner from Calgary, Canada. David has worked for the city of Vancouver and Calgary at various levels of public service for the past 23 years. 

I spoke with David about What is Delight and Why We Should Care, the reason behind it, and what he is most proud of. 

Chasing Delight

In February 2021, David got the idea to start a Mug Club that centers delight. The initial inspiration came from the NPR program, This American Life, and Ross Gay’s series of essays, The Book of Delights. The essays are essentially a study of joy on how we can be kinder to each other. The book features the small joys most of us overlook as we get lost in the stress and routines of our daily lives. 

In public service, kindness and joy go a long way. While the work of a public servant can be taxing, David was determined to discover what brings those in his field delight and joy and how to engender more delight in public service. Essentially, this delight-centered Mug Club seeks to pull the extraordinary out of the ordinary. 

To center delight in these meetings, David focuses on two questions:

• How do we bring delight into the work that we do?
• Why should we care that we bring delight to the 1.3 million citizens of Calgary?

Let’s take a closer look at David’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a What is Delight and Why Should We Care meeting, the main goal is to develop a “delight” muscle: to find delight and joy in the public service profession and identify why participants should care to do so. 

Preparation

One month before:

The facilitator and the tech team work together to formulate the structure and flow of activities for the upcoming meeting. The goal is to create a shared language and identify questions that facilitate a conversation about delight in the public service sphere.

One week before:

The facilitator sends three articles and related questions to encourage a common language amongst participants. 

Guidelines:

• No recordings 
• Read articles a week before the meeting

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location:  Held virtually
• Participants: Any member of the team can participate
• Tech support: To ensure the virtual meeting is flawlessly executed

Tools:

•  Microsoft Teams

Deliverables:

• Open and vulnerable conversation
• Identifying how delight surfaces in public service and how it impacts the community

In a What is Delight and Why Should We Care session, David opens the invitation to all 16,000 people that work for the City of Calgary. Anyone can participate, whether it’s someone in senior leadership or a first-year new employee. In this particular meeting, 30 to 40 people participated, most of which were in middle management from various departments. 

Plan the Workshop:

• Length of time: 50 minutes (8:05 am – 8:55 am)

Activities:

• Answer prompts pulled from articles 
• Share stories around delight
• Use the “chat” feature to share links, gifs, and memes

Agenda:

• Opening
  • Discuss three “delight” articles
  • Prompt discussion with two-three questions

• Middle/Divergence
  • Identify a common purpose
  • Identify similarities/differences around delight

• End/Convergence
  • Consider the larger audience
  • Delightful ideation: identify ways to continue the conversation around delight

Before the Opening

15 minutes before the meeting starts, David suggests the facilitator practice meditative breathing. This helps the facilitator prepare to host an engaging session. 

Opening

The initial goal of a What is Delight and Why Should We Care meeting is to create a shared language around delight. The facilitator kickstarts the discussion with two or three questions related to the required reading. 

David invites all City of Calgary employees to participate and focus on big picture issues, welcoming individuals from different workgroups with various levels of expertise to join. David encourages participants to brainstorm on how they can improve the city as public servants by centering joy and delight. In these sessions, topics such as paving the roads, setting recreation programs, and similar issues are addressed. 

David finds that the participants of his monthly What is Delight meetings are excited to speak with each other and share their thoughts:

“People are energized. They’re maybe even pent up, that they’re wanting to express their ideas, their thoughts, to ask questions, to see people that they might not have seen all month.”

As David facilitates, he works alongside one other person that pays attention to all tech concerns, such as observing what happens on the chat, noting related questions, monitoring the expressions and hands up, and providing general tech support.

Middle/Divergence

Towards the middle of the meeting, the facilitator identifies a common purpose amongst participants. Guests share their ideas of delight and identify similarities and differences.

David encourages active listening as the participants answer the titular questions, “What is delight?” and “Why should we care?” During this phase of the meeting, participants are encouraged to be vulnerable and share new ways of looking at delight. 

Flexibility is a key component during this phase as participants explore the big picture around the idea of delight and how it shows up in public service. At this point, guests may use the chat function in Microsoft Teams to share gifs, post links, and use memes to convey ideas. 

End/Convergence

As the meeting comes to a close, the facilitator will encourage the participants to consider ways to carry delight to their larger audience. This stage consists of ideating ways to keep delight at the center of their focus outside of the meetings.

David ends the What is Delight sessions by encouraging participants to continue the conversation around delight to their audience of stakeholders, community activists, and colleagues. In February 2021, the What is Delight session culminated in the creation of a new “Delight Experiment” Teams channel to further conversation. 

Though the Delight Experiment was designed for one month, it’s still running eight months later. This delight channel serves as a way for the city employees to center delight in their personal and professional lives, prompting over 80 people to continue the conversation in between each What is Delight session. 

The Delight Experiment

Balance, flexibility, and vulnerability are key components of the What is Delight and Why Should We Care meetings. David notes that pairing the three-part structure of the meeting with the freeform ideation phase allows for vulnerability and meaningful conversation amongst participants.

As the meetings continue, David hopes that more of the senior leadership team will enter this conversation. The invitation to the What is Delight meetings are open to all, and he hopes those further up in leadership will join in in the near future. 

In David’s effort to answer What is Delight and Why Should We Care through his monthly Mug Club, he discovered the joy in centering delight daily. In his efforts to stimulate the ongoing search for delight in the public service sphere, David is most proud of the Delight Experiment channel as it is still going strong. 

“A single meeting around the idea, ‘What is delight?’, has prompted over 80 people to continue the conversation every day about what brings them delight, why we should care, and how we bring delight into the public service, and that helps us as the citizens of Calgary.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post What Is Delight and Why Should We Care appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings people thrive in. 

Today’s story is with Jackie Colburn, a design sprint facilitator and independent consultant out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. After six years of working in strategy and client leadership at GoKart Labs, Jackie founded her own Design Sprint practice in 2017. Jackie champions the design process in everything she does and is fond of activities that center storytelling as a vehicle for human emotion.

Jackie works with clients to design an environment that facilitates creativity, collaboration, and symbiotic relationships in the workplace. In her practice, Jackie loves to step in when teams are ready to make the change, but aren’t sure what the way forward looks like. Through optimism and openness, Jackie brings teams through the hurdle of miscommunication and damaged dynamics to realize their true potential.

I spoke with Jackie about her Teaming meeting, the reason behind it, and what she would do differently.

A Time for Teaming

Part of Jackie’s facilitation success comes from identifying the perfect time for a Teaming session, as was the case with her client, a sports company amidst transition. In this particular meeting, Jackie’s client experienced two major events: a newly appointed CEO and the recent acquisition of another company. Jackie put together a strategy designed to ease her client out of their current ambiguity and to identify a clearer path towards the future. 

In this time of change, Jackie discovered that the CEO and the founder were both open to creative problem-solving. Jackie shares that both the CEO and the founder “were aware that they had a problem and then they were willing to say, ‘We need help solving this problem.’”

Let’s take a closer look at Jackie’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

While most of Jackie’s clients bring her in to facilitate a design sprint, this Teaming session was different. To unify the leadership team, Jackie used the following guidelines for her workshop:

Guidelines

Gather office supplies for organization and note-taking:

• Trust the process
• No tech
• Empathy for one another 
• Use “Yes, and” statements

In a Teaming meeting, the facilitator will choose the:

Materials:

• Basket for the “tech check”
• Post-it notes in various sizes
• Timer

Jackie recommends a team of seven people for a successful Teaming session. Jackie’s team included the founder, CRO, new CEO, head of marketing, head of product, founder of the newly acquired company, and CFO.

Plan the Workshop:

• Length of time: 7 hours (10 am – 5 pm)

Activities:

• Issues List: keep, kill, combine
• Storyboarding
• Gain/Pain deep dives
• Sailboat activity (AJ&Smart)
• Action planning

Agenda:

• Grounding
  • Icebreaker
  • Guidelines
  • Tech check

• Opening
  • Introductions 
  • Issues list
    
• Storytelling
  • Storyboarding
  • Gains/Pains
  • Issues list review

• Strategic Plan Review
  • Intro from CEO
  • Team feedback: “I like, I wish, I wonder”
  • Issues list review

• From Issue to Action
  • Sailboat (AJ&Smart)
  • Action Planning

• Closing

Exercises: Grounding

In the grounding phase of a Teaming session, the facilitator reviews the day’s itinerary, identifies the intent of the session, and asks why each participant is there. 

As Jackie’s client experienced chaos amidst the changing leadership positions and the company integration, it was important for her to start the meeting with trust and empathy at the forefront. Jackie led the team with a check-in and asked participants to share the last emoji they used before requesting that everyone place their phone into the basket. Following the check-in, Jackie shared her “people-first” mentality to encourage each participant to see past their roles in the company.

Exercises: Opening

The opening phase of a Teaming session gives both the founders, CEO, and other participants the opportunity to introduce themselves and zero in on the day-long workshop.

During the opening of Jackie’s meeting, the CEO and Founder gave a brief company history and insights of what they observed within the company, as well as outcomes they hoped to reach during the session.

After the initial intro, the rest of the team introduced themselves and shared about their personal and professional bests from the last six months and what they were hoping to get out of the experience, as well as what was working, and what wasn’t. 

Exercises: Storytelling

In this phase of the meeting, the facilitator uses storytelling to encourage authenticity from the workshop participants. 

In her session, Jackie asked participants to storyboard “What’s happened for me over the past six months?”, as well as part of their story that offered the most gain and the most pain. 

During this exercise, each person noted something they did that made the moment a “gain” and what they did that made the moment challenging. Through the storyboarding process, team members also challenged each other by noting ways the other person might make a future challenge less painful.  

Through the storytelling exercises, Jackie kickstarted the cross-team discussion that is the heart of the Teaming process. 

“We had the storyboards up on the wall and looked at one another’s stories and spoke to one another across the team. It was good, it was one of those moments where I felt like, ‘Yay, it’s working.’”

Exercises: Strategic Plan Review

Following the lunch break, the CEO reviews the strategic plan, and the team offers feedback.

In this particular meeting, Jackie encouraged the team members to use “I like, I wish, I wonder” statements to share feedback on the strategic plan. The team then reviewed the issues list again to consider new issues and agree on the most important two.

Exercises: From Issue to Action

During this phase, the facilitator uses the sailboat activity to discuss the top two issues.

Jackie drew a boat as team members identified what pushed the boat forward or held it back in relation to each issue. The team then decided on “to-solves”, reframed them as “how might we” questions, and focused on idea generation. This was followed by an action planning step where each team member identified the top five actions they wanted to take as well as one action they wanted another member to take. 

When asked how she might improve the meeting, Jackie noted that she would have ended the meeting earlier. With such a packed agenda, Jackie shared that the action planning step might have been more productive as a separate meeting.

Exercises: Closing

The CEO and Founder shared their thank yous as the session ended. Team members shared their intentions and closings.

Exercises: Teaming with the Intention of Healing

While it isn’t always easy to identify the right solution to a problem, it’s painfully clear when something isn’t working. However, it is in this setting that Jackie thrives.

“I would say this is the type of session I would run during a moment of transition or if the team feels like their health is suffering. That’s why I liked the name Teaming or Gelling, it felt more like a group therapy workshop but with the intention of healing and working better together.”

Teaming puts a team’s EQ at the forefront, with transparency as the main priority. Through these sessions, Jackie strips each team down to their authentic selves, encouraging members to share their successes, and losses as they prioritize open communication above all. This vulnerability Jackie achieves through her Teaming sessions is what makes these meetings so magical: 

“I’m proud that the team was able… to show up, and not just sugarcoat or talk around the issues, we really got into the issues. I know that they felt like it impacted the health of the team moving forward.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Teaming appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings people thrive in. 

Today’s story is with Dr. Myriam Hadnes, connector, behavioral economist, and facilitator from Amsterdam, Netherlands. Passionate about creativity and human behavior, Myriam facilitates business and team workshops with a focus on helping meeting participants “get out of their own way”. 

Myriam is well versed in the art of connecting and leading game-changing meetings as she is the creator of the podcast Workshops Work, founder and curator of NeverDoneBefore, and project facilitator at European Investment Bank (EIB).

With an emphasis on helping meeting members build stronger networks and share knowledge, Myriam is passionate about leading meetings that cut to the heart of the matter and enrich each participant with passion and purpose.

I spoke with Myriam about a meeting template she calls “Project Kickoff”,  the reason behind this meeting, what it accomplished, and where the magic happens.

Finding That Magic Moment

The Project Kickoff is a specific meeting template Myriam uses to connect a team or department as they gear up for an upcoming venture. In my conversation with Myriam, we discuss a Project Kickoff meeting held before the start of a European summer school as they prepared to host 70 students for 10 days.

With Project Kickoff sessions, as with any meeting Myriam hosts, she aims to find the magic moment of any workshop: the moment each team member finds their reason to be there and the motivation to keep going. 

As each participant prepares for the project ahead, this meeting serves as a way to encourage them to work as hard and learn as much as possible heading into a week of unexpected challenges. 

The Meeting Preparation

Before the meeting begins, Myriam identifies the goal and prepares to get participating team members on the same page. Following the Project Kickoff template, the meeting facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: The location should provide space for team members to break out into groups of two or three 

• Setup: The meeting should begin with the chairs arranged in a circle and enough wall space to cluster sticky notes

• Participants: Invitations should be sent to a diverse group of staff that are the most instrumental in executing the upcoming event or project 

Materials

Gather office supplies for organization and note-taking:

• Sharpies
• A4 paper
• M&M’s

Myriam recommends limiting the team to six people for a more focused session. In the summer camp Project Kickoff, Myriam’s team included individuals from various departments such as advisory, finance, and operations. 

Plan the Workshop:

• Length of time: 90- minutes
• Day: Generally a weekday excluding Monday or Friday

Software: SessionLab

Schedule:

• Icebreaker
• Check-In
• Breakout Group
• Check-Out 

Exercise:

At the start of this 90-minute Kickoff session, Myriam led with an icebreaker to help tackle nerves and get the creativity going, passing out M&Ms as a snack. The question, “If you had a superpower what would it be?” helped to break down the barriers and hierarchy of all team members involved.

Following the icebreaker, each individual took two minutes to share who they were and why they were there. This way, everyone understood they were working on the same project, even if their backgrounds and roles were different. The rest of the check-in served to get the entire team on the same page as they geared up for a week of intense focus, hard work, and unexpected challenges.

Myriam’s approach to facilitation prioritizes organization and orderliness.

“If unstructured, it’s quite easy to lose yourself in the details without bringing the meeting back together… For me actually, a meeting is successful if the people leave with a better understanding and less confusion than when they walked in,” Myriam said.

The Breakout Group

With a team of six engaged and energized individuals, the meeting shifts into the breakout portion. 

Identify Needs, Problems, and Roles

The team splits into groups of two or three to identify potential needs, problems, and roles the upcoming project or event will require of them.

In the meeting, Myriam considers the issues the team would face throughout a week of summer camp. Questions like “Who will handle the logistics in the event of missing equipment?” and “How can the staff make sure each camper had a meaningful experience?” are addressed.

Activity: Matching Talents to Roles

These discussions segued into identifying roles that needed to be filled, such as someone responsible for managing the sound equipment and another individual responsible for connecting with the campers. 

With the roles identified, Myriam encouraged each team to create a list of hidden passions and talents. This process served to help each team member connect with their “why”, allowing them to feel like a valued member of the group and giving them a clear responsibility to fulfill when the time came. 

During this activity, each participant notes their primary and secondary roles on a sheet of paper. As a way to encourage connectivity and teamwork in the groups, each individual’s primary role is something they struggle with, allowing them the opportunity to evolve and strengthen their talents.

The Check-Out

A Tech Retro is for and by developers. While pair-programming is essentially continuous code review, it can still be useful to take some time to step back and look at the codebase. Tech Retros often take the traditional “Smiley / Frownie / Meh” format but focus exclusively on the codebase. This is a great time to talk about modeling Similar to the check-in meeting, the check-out brings the group of six back together, wrapping up by giving each team member homework. In her story, Myriam began the check-out by asking questions like, “What are the biggest challenges we face?” and “What are some risks to prepare for?” Myriam gave the team homework to fill their roles with more “meat” as they prepared for their new responsibilities. 

Breaking the Barriers to Problem Solving

Myriam explains that the success of her Project Kickoff meetings lies in the meeting’s transformative power to break the ice, break down barriers, and eliminate anxiety and stress. Thus, creating an open-minded, creative team that is ready to face whatever lies ahead.

As the Project Kickoff meeting gives each person a mission and passion, Myriam hopes to eliminate fear, doubt, and anxiety with each check-in and check-out.

Explaining the power in identifying roles, Myriam shares,

“They walked in as a group of strangers, kind of being maybe intimidated and stressed or, “What will happen? Am I good enough? How will I know what I have to do?” Walking out with new friends and the confidence that now they have their own little thing that they’re responsible about.”

The Power of Six

In any meeting filled with participants pulled from every department, Myriam warns of the risk of creating hierarchies. In her Project Kickoff meetings, she aimed to level the field, no matter the individual’s academic or professional background. 

I ask Myriam what improvements she would like to make going forward and she shares that she would urge her clients to make the check-ins and check-outs a regular part of their department meetings. As her clients experience tremendous success by applying her Project Kickoff template to specific projects and events, she has no doubt applying this method to daily operations would yield successful results as well.

Wrapping up our conversation, I asked Myriam what her favorite part of the Project Kickoff template is. “The power of it”, she shared, “that six people gained confidence and buy-in.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Project Kickoff appeared first on Voltage Control.

The future of work is hybrid. Whether we like it or not, hybrid and virtual work is here to stay as the workforce becomes more distributed. As a result of forced virtual work during the pandemic, many companies realized employees don’t need to be in a physical office to be successful or have successful meetings. In fact, multiple studies show remote work actually boosts productivity. Therefore, companies like Twitter, Slack, and LinkedIn made the decision to offer permanent virtual work options. As remote and hybrid work become the new norm, it will be increasingly important that virtual meetings are productive. To help make your virtual meetings more effective, we’ve curated 5 best practices you can apply today to improve virtual meetings within your team. 

Best practices to run an effective virtual meeting 

1. No Purpose, No Meeting

Meeting rule number one, whether it’s in a virtual or in-person setting, is to have a worthwhile reason to bring people together. During the pandemic, many teams got into the habit of jumping on a Zoom call whenever they wanted to discuss anything. This can be helpful in some cases, but not necessary for every little thing. Why do you want to have a meeting? What exactly do you need to accomplish? You must have a clear purpose if you want to have a productive meeting. Without one, the discussion will be vague and unfocused. You can’t work to meet a goal that you have not first identified.

• Ask yourself why you want to have the virtual meeting in the first place:Are there decisions that need to be made?
• Do new concepts or processes need to be developed? Is there an important deliverable you want to talk through?
• Are you seeking advice from your team?

Only when you have the concrete answer should you schedule a meeting. Matters that aren’t worth scheduling a collective discussion for can be addressed with an email or via Slack. You don’t want to waste anyone’s time, not to mention the money that is lost to unproductive meetings–$37 billion annually. Schedule with purpose!

“The majority of meetings should be discussions that lead to decisions.” –Patrick Lencioni, author and President of The Table Group

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2. Create and distribute an agenda 

Prepare an agenda beforehand to outline what needs to be discussed and decided. As a best practice, only include essential topics to avoid wasted time. This will block out any unnecessary discussion that isn’t central to the objective and keep the meeting focused. An important aspect of an agenda, especially for a virtual meeting, is a realistic timetable with roles and responsibilities. If topics and/or tasks have (or should have) specific people owning them, include that information in the agenda for clarity. What will be discussed when, for how long, and by whom? Map these details out and follow them as closely as possible. 

With that being said, timing and attention are much different in a virtual environment. Things take longer online because of the tools you must use and the need to get everyone on board. That means you must include time in the agenda to set people up in whatever tool you use (more on that later) as well as buffer time to troubleshoot any technical issues that may arise. Realistically, there will be lags and time-sucking overlaps that wouldn’t otherwise happen in an in-person meeting. That’s why it’s crucial to be concise with your schedule in content and timing. Be strategic. But also be flexible – working from home has additional distractions that don’t typically occur in the office, such as family members, pets, and all those Amazon deliveries. The virtual meeting space is a novelty for most. It will take trial and error to get your meeting prep recipe down just right, but following these virtual meeting best practices will help you get there!

“If we have a clear agenda in advance and we are fully present and fully contributing, the meetings do go much faster.” –Arianna Huffington, co-founder of Huffington Post website

Once you have created your agenda, send it to all attendees in advance (ideally 24 hours before the meeting, if possible). This will ensure that everyone is on the same page and ready to participate when they log in to the meeting. Another beneficial aspect to consider is the need for any pre-work. Remember, you want to be ready to hit the ground running and only focus on your objective during the meeting, not spend (and waste) time preparing attendees during the scheduled time. Doing the work in the meeting is another one of our Meeting Mantras. Is there anything that needs to be assigned to participants before the meeting in order for everyone to be fully prepared, in order to have the most effective and successful meeting possible? If so, send that along with the agenda so that everyone is ready and aligned from the start. This will save time and increases engagement and productivity. 

3. Pick your tool

At Voltage Control we use and recommend Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Butter as core tools for hosting virtual meetings. They all have slightly different features, but all three support video conferencing during virtual meetings. Pick whichever platform best meets your needs then make sure everyone knows how to use it. While most people know how to use them by now, consider sending out a how-to for any newbies and plan for an extra few minutes at the beginning of the meeting for everyone to join and get connected. Even the most advanced users can experience technical difficulties!

Pro-tip: use our custom-built Control Room app to engage and inspire groups of any size like a master facilitator.

Some additional best practice tools for virtual meetings include:

• Krisp: Mute background noise during the call.
• Google Slides: Free tool to create presentations or slides to share prior to and during the meeting.
• Google Docs: Take notes during the virtual meeting.
• SessionLab: Dynamically design, organize and share workshops and training content.
• Trello or Asana: Project management tools to help keep track of assigned work and priorities following the meeting.
• World Time Buddy: World clock, time zone converter, and online meeting scheduler to coordinate and plan across different time zones.
• Mural: Digital-first whiteboard with collaborative templates for visual collaboration including planning, brainstorming, and designing.
• Figma: Collaborative design platform to design, prototype, and gather feedback in real-time in one place.

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4. Keep everyone involved and engaged, and prioritize human connection

Making sure all participants are engaged is much more difficult when people are ON their devices. Encourage the use of video (pro tip: review the best practices of video conferencing etiquette here) and silenced phones to optimize participating during the virtual meeting and to get the most out of it. We also recommend you include periodic opportunities for everyone to work asynchronously and have key moments of high engagement where the entire group is involved at the same time. Doing so will keep people from disengaging.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, remember the necessity of human connection. This best practice is especially important in the virtual era. Tending to your remote team’s health is essential for team connection and for employees to succeed. Intentionally create opportunity for connection outside of the meeting agenda itself, as virtual work lacks the ability for attendees to meet, mingle, and have watercooler conversations before and after the meeting like in-person meetings offer.

Team conversations outside of the meeting can be just as important as they are during the meeting. They build trust, connection, and rapport with team members. You can make up for this by scheduling an extra few minutes before and/or after the meeting to have free chat. Or schedule a team happy or coffee hour to mingle and connect–it doesn’t have to be a full 60 minutes! Another idea to spark some friendly competition and engagement is utilizing Kahoot! during your virtual meeting. Any time spent getting the team together to breathe, check-in, and network is invaluable to overall team performance and happiness when you’re back in work mode. 

5. Debrief, Debrief, Debrief

Allot time at the end of the virtual meeting to debrief with the group. Summarize the major decisions and takeaways, and outline tangible next steps. Ask and answer questions to align as needed. Assign owners (with clear deadlines) to each task or action item so there is no confusion or clarification needed on who is responsible for what following the meeting.

Finally, consider ending on a light note with small talk or a joke to boost everyone’s mood and energy before heading out to tackle responsibilities! Send a meeting follow-up with the notes and action items shortly after the meeting via email, Google Docs, or Slack so everyone is on the same page and has all information readily accessible.

The inability to meet in person doesn’t mean we can’t have purposeful and effective meetings! We just need to adapt to the virtual environment, help one another, and roll with the punches. Consider hiring a professional facilitator to help navigate this shift to virtual and set your business up to experience positive results. A facilitator’s job is to actively guide teams through the decision-making process to reach goals and desired outcomes. They are unbiased leaders removed from emotion about office politics, which allows them to objectively lead with a clear vision of the sought-after goal. Their purpose is to ensure that a team meets its objectives, has fruitful conversations, and that the group gets what they need and want from the gathering. We also developed various downloadable resources and guides on Magical Meetings, Remote Design Sprints, and Hybrid Work to help you and your team navigate this unique time. We’re all in this together! 

Want to learn more about our virtual services? 

Voltage Control offers virtual services including Virtual Facilitation, Virtual Transitions, and Virtual Meeting Design. We also offer online courses, training, and workshops on Magical Meetings, Design Sprints and Design Thinking, and Large Virtual Meetings. Please reach out at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you are interested in learning more and for a consultation. 

The post Virtual Meeting Best Practices appeared first on Voltage Control.

In the world of innovation, retrospective meetings are an essential component of a project lifecycle. They’re the crucial debrief or “look back” at the work that took place during an agile project to evaluate effectiveness and gather feedback on how to improve and mitigate risk moving forward. We’ve been a part of many retrospectives with our internal team at Voltage Control as well as with clients after Design Sprints and innovation workshops, and after each iteration of an agile project. To get the most out of attendees at retrospective meetings, and to ultimately optimize the retrospective process, we utilize the power of the Liberating Structures format. 

In this article, we’ll review Liberating Structures and the retrospective concept, then go through some examples of how to apply the Liberating Structures format to a retrospective meeting. You can also find additional options, strategies, relationships, and solutions using the best Liberating Structures in meetings here.

The Impact of Liberating Structures on Retrospectives

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, including those in today’s increasingly virtual environment. 

“Liberating Structures introduce tiny shifts in the way we meet, plan, decide and relate to one another. They put the innovative power once reserved for experts only in the hands of everyone.” -Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless

Before diving into the examples of how to use Liberating Structures in a retrospective meeting, let’s quickly review what a retrospective is. At a high level, a retrospective is an opportunity to reflect on a project and learn and improve. It may be a single long meeting after a large project is finished, depending on the environment. In agile environments, a retrospective is most commonly shorter and held often (i.e. 90 minutes at the end of a Design Sprint). Questions are asked and discussed such as:

• What did we do well?
• What did we do wrong? 
• What can we do better in the future? How can we best move forward?
• Pro tip: Share the questions ahead of time with team members so they can review and provide answers before the retrospective, resulting in time better spent during the meeting.

Retrospectives are an essential tool to help teams thrive in innovation. However, they can also get complicated and complex, leaving little room to extract team members’ ideas and input. Liberating Structures are an efficient and effective way to facilitate these meetings and help get the most out of them.

Find tips and tricks on facilitating Design Sprint retrospectives like a pro here.

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3 Ways to Use Liberating Structures in a Retrospective

Now, let’s dive into 3 Liberating Structures examples that can be utilized for a retrospective.

1. What, So What, Now What?

This is a Liberating Structures technique that helps groups reflect on a shared experience to build understanding while avoiding unproductive conflict during a retrospective. You collect information about “What Happened,” make sense of the information with “So What” and, finally, uncover what actions logically follow with “Now What.” It is a very helpful exercise to help the team identify the pain points of a project and how to solve them.

What, So What, Now What? Steps

1. Individuals write down observations that stood out (1 min.)
2. Discuss observations in a small group for (2–7 min.)
3. Share with the whole group (2–3 min.)
4. Capture the important WHATs on a whiteboard.
5. Individuals write down patterns, hypotheses, and conclusions. (1 min.)
6. In a small group, discuss patterns, hypotheses, and conclusions (2–7 min.)
7. Small groups share with the whole group. (2–5 min.)
8. Capture the important SO WHATs on a whiteboard.
9. Individuals write down next steps (1 min.)
10. In a small group discuss the next steps (2–7 min.)
11. Small groups share with the whole group. (2–10 min.)
12. Capture the important NOW WHATs on a whiteboard

2. 15% Solutions

This simple (but extremely powerful) Liberating Structure is great when a retrospective’s time is limited but you want to get a group or team focused on what they are going to do next. The activity helps individuals think about small tweaks they can make to move toward and improve upon the larger goal.  The 15% Solution is the first step or solution that an individual can do without approval or resources from others. It is something that anyone can start right now if they want to. “15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change.” –Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless

15% Solutions Steps

1. Introduce the 15% Solutions concept to the team.
2. Each person generates his or her own list of 15% Solutions. (5 min.)
3. Individuals share their ideas with a small group. (3 min./person)
4. Group members ask clarifying questions and offer advice. (5-7 min./person)

3. TRIZ

This Liberating Structure is all about creative destruction and encouraging anti-patterns to unlock value and question the status quo. It forces teams to look at what didn’t work, targeting the “What did we do wrong?” question, or the worst-case scenario that could happen when bringing an idea to fruition. Do not identify net-new behaviors. Instead, focus on the worst-case scenario associated with the way your team functions, your product, project, or service offering. 

Pro-tip: Use our Triz templates for MURAL and Miro with your team during the retrospective to capture ideas, ideate, and reflect on the findings. 

TRIZ Steps

1. Introduce the concept of TRIZ to the team.
2. Identify an unwanted result that the group will focus on. If needed, have the groups brainstorm and pick the most unwanted result. (5 min.)
3. Each group uses 1–2–4-All to make a list of all it can do to make sure that it achieves this most unwanted result. 1–2–4-All refers to working alone, then in pairs, then foursomes, and finally as a whole group. (10 min.)
4. Each group uses 1–2–4-All to make a list of all that it is currently doing that resembles items on their first list. (10 min.)
5. Each group uses 1–2–4-All to determine for each item on its second list what first steps will help it stop this unwanted activity/program/procedure. (10 min.)

Utilize Liberating Structures for Project Improvement

Next time you are planning a retrospective, consider incorporating Liberating Structures to get the most out of your team and capitalize on improving your project. These three Liberating Structure exercises can be pieced together or combined with other Liberating Structures to best fit your team and needs. To help you implement them in your next meeting, we created free interactive MURAL and Miro templates for you to use.

Additional Resources

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.
• Connect with a Liberating Structures community

We’ll lead you through our favorite Liberating Structures for opening, exploring, and closing in your facilitation. We’ll teach you about these methods and why and how they work. You’ll learn tips and tricks for using Liberating Structures across your work to facilitate lasting change. You can also learn hands-on in real-time at one of our Liberating Structures workshops: a deep-dive of Liberating Structures, when, and how to use them to unleash creativity in your meetings through maximum participation.

The post How to Use Liberating Structures for a Retrospective appeared first on Voltage Control.

At Voltage Control, we are Liberating Structures enthusiasts. Liberating Structures is a framework for facilitation created by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, intended to provide simple rules that make it easy to promote inclusion and participatory decision making. At a high level, Liberating Structures consists of 33 microstructures designed to build trust and enhance cooperation and communication between teammates. In today’s increasingly hybrid environment, Virtual Liberating Structures will also become more prominent as more of the workforce elects to work remotely. Applying Liberating Structures virtually will also come with its own set of nuances. Learn how to utilize Virtual Liberating Structures to unleash engagement, provide space for good ideas, and address challenges your team or organization may be facing. 

What is the Liberating Structures Framework?

The Liberating Structures framework is built around improving coordination and promoting participation by including and unleashing all team members. The framework consists of a collection of structures or methods that are meant to introduce small shifts in the way teams meet, plan, decide, and learn. They put the innovation once reserved for experts into the hands of everyone within a team or organization. Each of the 33 microstructures is easy to learn. Regardless if you’re an experienced leader at the executive level or new hire at the entry-level, this framework can work for you and your team (with a little practice, of course). 

Most organizations in today’s business environment rely on what Lipmanowicz and McCandless refer to as “conventional microstructures.” These microstructures are structures that teams default to when meeting and organizing into groups. These conventional microstructures are either too inhibiting (i.e. status reports/updates, managed discussions, presentations), or too loose and disorganized (i.e. open discussion and brainstorming) according to Lipmanowicz and McCandless. They often are limited in the number of participants 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. Liberating Structures, and Virtual Liberating Structures, provide more constructive alternatives than the conventional structures by including everybody regardless of group size, seniority or comfort level, and distributing control among all participants.

For more information on when to use Liberating Structures and solutions on using the best Liberating Structure for the job, download our guide here.

Why Virtual Liberating Structures Are Important

Liberating Structures offer an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. In today’s distributed workforce, Virtual Liberating Structures will become more necessary as teams and organizations won’t always be all together in the same office anymore. Even when in person, conventional facilitation and microstructures can be creativity’s worst enemy. They often end up in the exclusion of the more introverted team members in the room, lack organization, and discourage out-of-the-box thinking. It’s difficult to feel encouraged and engaged after a 30 minute PowerPoint over Zoom presentation followed by an unfacilitated brainstorm (in which a couple of the highest-positioned extroverts do most of the talking). 

When applied to virtual meetings, these drawbacks of conventional facilitation and microstructures only get worse. Little regard to the unique challenges of virtual facilitation and participation will result in frustration for both you and your team. Remote participants face more distractions, more technical difficulties, and less engagement than in-person participants in virtual meetings and/or workshops. You will want, and need, to put extra thought into inclusion, participation, and engagement to make the most of remote, virtual and hybrid communication. This is why Virtual Liberating Structures is such a great framework for remote teams. 

The framework’s advantages–participation promotion, creative empowerment, and cooperation improvement–precisely counteract the challenges of meeting and working together remotely. When everyone in the virtual room feels enabled to participate, virtual meetings will naturally produce more and higher quality work. Team members and participants are invited because they have something of value to offer, regardless of title or level. Consequently, it’s critical to empower them to contribute. Collaboration between participants will promote individual creativity by enabling everyone to build off each others’ ideas and inspire one another. The group is smarter than any individual.

The Liberating Structures frameworks’ focus on participation will make attention management significantly easier, especially in a remote and virtual environment. Liberating Structures, whether in person or remote, operate under the philosophy that every participant has a lot to contribute, which means that every participant is being asked to take an active role. Participants who are actively engaged and engaging are much less likely to become distracted and/or disengaged.

Virtual Liberating Structures Examples

We understand that adapting all 33 Liberating Structures in a virtual setting can seem daunting. That’s why we detail Liberating Structure activities to strengthen virtual collaboration in another post here. In summary, here are a couple of Liberating Structures that are applicable to the virtual work environment and can strengthen virtual teams:

Troika Consulting

This activity allows an opportunity for two participants to become consultants for a third group member (the “client.”) The first client shares a question or challenge, then the consultant has 1-2 minutes to ask clarifying questions. When time is up or the consultants are finished asking questions, the client will mute their audio and allow the consultants to spend 4-5 minutes generating suggestions and advice. The consultants will then have 1-2 minutes to share their most valuable feedback to the client. This activity builds trust between teammates and helps participants better understand each other’s strengths and areas of expertise.

Conversation Café

This is a longer activity that will make group discussion more structured and train participants to strike a balance between speaking and listening. Participants will break into small groups or breakout rooms in Zoom; one participant from each group will act as The Host, whose responsibility (in addition to participating in the activity) is to step in when another participant isn’t following a simple set of agreements. Within these groups, team members will move through four rounds of conversation:

• First round: Each group member will have one minute to share their thoughts or feelings regarding the given conversation topic.
• Second round: Each group member will get another minute to share their thoughts and feelings after having listened to what others had to say. Traditionally a “talking object” is passed around in person to signify whose turn it is to speak, but in a virtual setting, you will have an appropriate replacement.  For example, everyone mutes their microphones and participants use the “raise hand” feature in Zoom to signal that they’d like to talk next, or each participant is asked to bring a common household item to the meeting, such as a mug or a spatula, to hold up in place of one singular talking object.
• Third round: This is an open conversation in which participants can speak when they wish rather than taking turns. You may choose to continue using your talking object method (or “raise hand” feature) or to leave them in round two. This is likely where The Host will need to step in the most; ask them to encourage quieter members to talk and over-sharers to leave space for them to do so.
• Fourth (and final) round: Give each member a moment to share their biggest takeaways from the previous three rounds of conversation, round-robin style.

This exercise helps the quieter or more introverted participants build confidence contributing during virtual conversation, and the small groups make it harder for a participant to fade into the background (which is a bigger issue on Zoom vs. in-person meetings).

Additional Resources

We feel strongly that Liberating Structures has an approach to address almost any challenge you may have to overcome. Therefore, we developed a variety of resources to help support you as you navigate Virtual Liberating Structures for your team. 

We created interactive MURAL templates for the activities we use most often and hope you enjoy using them as much as we do. Note: find the template overview here.

We will be hosting a workshop on Virtual Liberating Structures later this year. Let our expert facilitators guide you to better understand and integrate Liberating Structures with your teams, both in-person and virtual. 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. 

Finally, Voltage Control offers an online Liberating Structures course that provides you and your team with the key foundations in Liberating Structures to unleash creativity in your meetings through maximum participation.

Want more assistance helping your virtual team thrive?

Here at Voltage Control, we are exercising and sharing the best tools and techniques needed for teams to thrive in the virtual workplace, through productive meetings, remote work team collaboration, considerations for return to work, facilitation skills, virtual events, meeting culture, Magical Meetings, and design sprints.

The post Virtual Liberating Structures: More Important Now than Ever appeared first on Voltage Control.