Professional Virtual Facilitation
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An experiential coaching workshop to help you facilitate virtual meetings like a Jedi.
Running an unforgettable virtual workshop requires much more than just an agenda. In this fun, fast-paced, hands-on class, you’ll sharpen your facilitation skills through practice and peer feedback. Our facilitators will lead you through various virtual facilitation methods, teaching why and how they work.
You’ll practice tips and tricks so you can incorporate these jedi techniques into everyday virtual meetings like a pro. You’ll end the day with a new way of looking at facilitating workshops online and the confidence to approach it with renewed energy and optimism. It’s not just about a bigger toolbox, but developing internal resources that you can draw on to be a master facilitator.
What to Expect
Keeping virtual meeting participants engaged requires more than an agenda. We will coach you how to leverage new paradigms like virtual liberating structures, sensemaking, capturing virtual room intelligence, how to pivot when virtual challenges come your way, and drafting the correct narratives as the backbone of your agenda. Lastly, we will show you how to capture feedback so that each member in the meeting is leveling up.
Agenda
Deep Work Session 1
The backbone of effective virtual meetings
Deep Work Session 2
The frameworks to boost engagement
Deep Work Session 3
The tools to foster creativity and capture virtual room intelligence
Deep Work Session 4
Level up with feedback like a pro
What You'll Learn
Facilitating effective meetings is hard enough in person. In a virtual context, it requires even more attention to detail. How do you keep all participants engaged during virtual meetings? It takes a pro-level toolkit and mindset to leave virtual meeting participants excited about the next virtual meeting. In this workshop, you will find many tools to get the most out of your distributed participants.
How You'll Learn
The class will be activity-based with facilitation simulations and collaborative sessions. You’ll have the chance to try new facilitation approaches and frameworks in a safe space. 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 from our experience running hundreds of workshops at some of the world’s largest enterprises.
Key Takeaways
The tools to enable your team to better sensemaking, decision-making, and capturing progress
Manage the diverse mix of strengths and personalities
Lead group synthesis of complex data
Juggle the multiple roles you have to play
Transform your workshop planning using a narrative framework
Approach group work mindfully
Bringing a Team?
Discounts are 20% off for a group of 3-4
Discounts are 30% off for a group of 5+
Email hello@voltagecontrol.com for group discount codes
Wait, what's facilitation?
Whether you know it or not, you are probably a facilitator. Facilitators lead and guide teams through important gatherings (think: “lockdowns,” working sessions, strategic meetings, etc.) to achieve better outcomes. They are skilled at developing focused agendas, leading collaborative activities, remaining impartial, and keeping participants on task. Even if you are not a professional facilitator, many of us have to play the role of facilitator at key moments in our day-to-day work. Here’s your chance to learn tools to do it more successfully.
About Douglas
Douglas is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based workshop agency that specializes in Design Sprints and innovation workshops. Prior to Voltage Control, Douglas held CTO positions at numerous Austin startups where he led product and engineering teams using agile, lean, and human-centered design principles. While CTO at Twyla, Douglas worked directly with Google Ventures running Design Sprints and now brings this experience and process to companies everywhere.
Douglas recently published Beyond the Prototype, which offers expert advice for people shifting from discovery projects to realization and launch. He is also the co-author of Start Within, How To Remix Anything, and Non-Obvious Guide to Fucking Awesome Meetings. Douglas is active in the Austin startup community where he serves on the board of several non-profits, mentors startups, and advises early-stage ventures. Douglas spends his free time patching up modular synthesizers, playing guitar, and taking photographs. He graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
About John
John is an entrepreneur and business coach. He is Chief Product Officer of Voltage Control, where we prototypes tools to help people facilitate better meetings. He enjoys designing technology through unlearning and the generous act of sonder. Prior to Voltage Control, John was Entrepreneur in Residence at Animal Ventures where he advised Fortune 100 leadership on their prototyping practices and led distributed software teams at the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and decentralized computing. John also worked directly with Google Ventures running Design Sprints and now coaches organizations how to develop rapid prototyping practices within their culture.
John is a co-author to two books with Douglas Ferguson: How To Remix Anything and Non-Obvious Guide to Fucking Awesome Meetings. He is finishing his third book Time Off - a look at how modern society is burning us out, why time off and creativity will be a crucial component to the future of human work, and the solutions to help us all prioritize our “rest ethic.” John spends his leisure time farming, hosting dinner parties, and practicing Jiu Jitsu. He graduated from University of Texas at Austin and is a proud alumni of Seth Godin’s altMBA.
What People are Saying
"There are many choices for workshops, but in my mind there are very few who get it right. Douglas Ferguson and Voltage Control get it. If you are looking to learn a topic for the first time or level up your own skills or that of your team, then the virtual workshops offered by Voltage Control are a great option. Thanks to the workshops, we are now confidently moving beyond design thinking and regularly pushing prototypes into production."
Robert T.
VP & SENIOR CORPORATE COUNSEL at LIBERTY MUTUAL
"One of the best things about the Voltage Control community is that they setup a virtual learning space that covers every aspect of Edgar Dale’s classic cone of learning. They encompass the principles of adult learning without ever talking about it ... they just do it."
Ron K.
digital change consultant at ibm
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 our events manager, Tara <tara@voltagecontrol.com>, if you have any concerns or if you wish to be exempted from this activity.
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