Facilitation Lab: David Newman

Improvisation for Ideation & Facilitation

Facilitation Lab is a weekly virtual meetup focused on helping facilitators hone their craft to help improve the quality of meetings.

Each week we rotate between highlighting facilitators sharing activities with tips and tricks, facilitation practice where you can get hands-on with tools for better meetings, and deep-dive skill-building workshops.

We’re honored to be part of the Google Global Sprint Chapter program that aims to build and foster a Design Sprint community by providing awareness, resources, and connecting people.

Date

September 2, 2021

Time

1pm - 3pm CDT​

Location

Live Online

This event is happening again!

You should join us on January 9

Get Tickets

Interested in a private cohort for your team?

What to expect

What to Expect

We offer opportunities for facilitators to gather in a safe judgement-free zone to learn from experts and one another. Our community offers many levels of engagement and exclusive resources for facilitators, whether you are a beginner or a Master Facilitator. Our weekly Facilitation Lab makes up 5 key segments: impromptu networking, our guest facilitator session activity, community critique, a weekly giveaway, & After Hours. Come & network with facilitators from around the globe and expand your facilitator toolbelt from each Lab experience!

What You'll Learn

Begin to explore the possibilities that improv games can bring to your workshops, team development, and ideation sessions. Improv can help break down the fear of failure, develop deep listening, elicit laughter and develop the capacity to act in the moment. It builds an agility in thinking, while also building trust within teams. Improv is a valuable tool for facilitation, ideation within groups, and team development.

How You'll Learn

The workshop will be activity-based with facilitation simulations and collaborative sessions. You’ll recognize, practice, and design your workshops based on key learning experience design principles. We won’t just talk at you — you’ll learn through doing, work with other participants, and get feedback. There will be plenty of time for Q&A, so you can learn in real-time from a master facilitator with tons of experience running hundreds of workshops at some of the world’s largest institutions and enterprises.

Agenda

Impromptu Networking

Engage with everyone in the community during a quick round of introductions to network and begin our time together

Guest Facilitator Session

Experience the lead facilitator's activity & method to engage together as a community.

Rose, Thorn, Bud Critique

Share your feedback as a community and offer expressions of tangible takeaways to our lead facilitator.

After Hours

Stay awhile & chat post-session about your experience in the Lab.

Who Should Attend

Team Managers & Leads

who want to learn more & benefit from the power of facilitation practice

UX Designers

who want to expand their facilitation skillset while gaining inspiration of new approaches

Experienced & New Facilitators

who want to level up their facilitation skills and enhance their facilitation tool belt

Teachers

who want to gain feedback & uncover new resources with forward-thinking activities

Key Takeaways

Learn the pillars of improv

Understand the importance of "yes, and..."

Practice dancing in the moment with ideas

Experience some exercises you can apply into your workshops

This event has ended

Interested in hearing when this workshop will occur next?

Kierra Johnson

Kierra Johnson is the Community Manager at Voltage Control and host of our weekly meet up sessions in the Facilitation Lab. She has developed a passion for community and bringing people together for as long as she can remember. A part of the community relations and customer service industry for over 5 years, she continues to implement this service expanding our network of facilitators through our Control the Room community. With the development of a true passion for people, she strives in building long-lasting relationships with clients in their communities and organizations. Building community through the Facilitation Lab, while networking with people of many industries and backgrounds inspires her to stretch the community to new heights each week in the Lab.

David Newman

Dr. David Newman is a Creativity Alchemist, Team and Creativity Coach, and teaches creativity at the University of British Columbia. Having spent many years rebelling against the limitations within the education system to ‘think differently,’ he has developed a teaching practice to explicitly help students find their suppressed creativity. His preference is to facilitate transformative learning experiences over conventional lectures. Outside of academia, he helps organizations unleash the creativity within their teams, and is the founder of Creatific Culture Labs, an umbrella organization for solopreneurs and small businesses helping organizations unleash their creativity, empower their innovation, and develop their organizational culture.
What People Are Saying

“I will be more intentional about anchoring around purpose before any event I host thanks to my experience in the Facilitation Lab. I loved the realization behind letting participants know we will be more effective if we are fully present."

Anonymous

Facilitation Lab Attendee

"I always enjoy the opportunity to network with other facilitators in the Facilitation Lab. I've gained so much knowledge from other attendees' insights & experiences each and every week in our community."

Anonymous

Facilitation Lab Attendee

Apply for a Diversity Scholarship

A key part of our mission is to support diverse facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. If you are a part of, or serve, a traditionally underrepresented group and feel that this scholarship would allow you to amplify this mission, please apply now.

Photo Disclaimer

Please note that photographs, video & audio recordings will be taken throughout this event. These will be used by Voltage Control for marketing and publicity in our publications, on our website and in social media, or in any third-party publication. Please contact us via email if you have any concerns or if you wish to be exempted from this activity.​

The Books

Bring Your Ideas to Life

Innovation can seem complex or reserved for the exceptional. But we believe innovation is for everyone. We’ve set out to illuminate a path for you to generate bold ideas, visualize and share them, overcome obstacles, and turn them into reality. Our books are equal parts guidebook and stories from years of experience helping companies adopt an innovation mindset and culture. They’re practical & actionable, so you can get started now. We hope they’ll help you on your journey to realizing your biggest, boldest ideas.

Learn More