Facilitation Lab: Open Lab

Open Lab

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

July 15, 2021

Time

1pm - 3pm CDT​

Location

Live Online

This event is happening again!

You should join us on December 12

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

Ever left a session and remembered all the content of all the sticky notes? Nope, most of us don’t. Ever left a session and remembered a few key concepts the group had named? “Hmmm, should we try out ‘The Big Swing’ or ‘The Guaranteed Garden’?” Organizing, and then naming concepts is a key facilitator skill. We use it to kick-start sense-making, enable strategic decisions, and leverage playful engagement. In this workshop, you’ll tease apart the foundational elements: narratives and taxonomies in order to deepen your logic modeling craft. You’ll also practice naming the contents of a logic model and reflect on when in your work you apply this method.

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

Develop stronger facilitation skills

Learn from other facilitators

Simple methods and techniques all facilitators can use

A community

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.

Douglas Ferguson

Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is Founder and President of Voltage Control, an Austin-based facilitation agency that specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques. He has helped transform teams from U.S. SOCOM, the Air Force, Adobe, Dropbox, Fidelity, Vrbo, Liberty Mutual, Humana, and SAIC.

Douglas is a thought leader and master facilitator of Design Sprints, Innovation Workshops, Team Alignment Workshops, Transformations, Meeting Systems, and Culture Workshops. He is also the author of three books: Beyond the Prototype, How to Remix Anything (co-authored), and Start Within (co-authored).

Motivated by a mission to rid the world of horrible meetings and offer meaningful meetings in their place, Voltage Control is calling upon fellow facilitators to transform meeting and innovation culture. From free weekly community meetups to Control the Room–the annual facilitator summit, Voltage Control is building a community of facilitators to change the world.

Over her career Hadassah’s built CX programs, civic tech services, open data & analytics interfaces, digital archives, and contributed to banking experiences, blockchain product design, HR processes, social impact and progressive tech organization development. She’s spoken on stages across the US and Canada.
What People Are Saying

"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.