What I found really interesting is that, for some time now, various conversations between co-workers and with clients have brought one clear issue to the fore. The Co-ops Practitioner networking session on ‘Governance and Participation’ that I facilitated on Tuesday 22nd January raised it yet again. Having worked through a process to define, develop and […]
When you don’t leave room for answers to percolate to the surface or you don’t persist with the question if the response isn’t immediate When you signal in all kinds of subtle ways that you’d rather just provide the answer yourself When you abandon the questioning process because the first couple of questions don’t open […]
Facilitating Change: Supporting Effective and Sustainable Action Groups A 7 day residential workshop in rural Wales, 15th-22nd March 2013. Effective group-work and high quality decision-making. That’s what we all long for, right? Yet bad process is rife in our grassroots action groups and can lead to a lack of trust and respect, frustration, resentment, burnout […]
Actually the question I’m pondering should be “how many minutes do we need to switch on the lightbulb in the minds of those we train?”. Jo wrestled with this question recently as she wrestled with delivering a short workshop. I spent Saturday afternoon delivering another very short workshop for Greenpeace Network Co-ordinators. The topic was […]
Here’s a guest post from Naveed Chaudhri, Activism Team Leader, Oxfam Campaigns: Oxfam is planning to pilot a new annual campaigning event, and we recently decided to ask our activist network for help in working out what it could look like. Staff had already been through a rigorous innovation process, and we wanted to consult […]
On October 20th, in Taunton, I facilitated an event called ‘Our Energy Future’ for Transition Somerset. I was keen to do so because it gave me a chance to try out four scenarios about our responses to peak oil and climate change. To start with, I acknowledged, but then ignored, two scenarios at either extreme: […]
I’m a firm believer in the power of experience, of doing, in learning. Nothing new there – it’s pretty standard practice nowadays and variations of experiential learning cycles abound. For me it’s about emotional engagement. I can learn without doing. I can learn from books, videos, presentations and all that jazz. But it’s sometimes hard […]
Having limited time to deliver a workshop focuses the mind wonderfully. What can actually be achieved, in terms of getting people thinking differently and then doing differently, if you only have 60 minutes? This was the situation for a short capacity building workshop for LeedsTidal at their Crisis Opportunity event in late October. If it […]
Craig Freshley’s talking common sense again over on his Good Group Tips blog. This time he has words of advice on agenda setting. Amazing how such a simple concept as agreeing what to talk about can be so fraught with politics, power-plays and confusion! He writes: “In principle, if we are a group of relative equals, […]
Last weekend Emily and I co-facilitated another round of Transition Leicester’s Footpaths project’s Facilitator Training. 13 volunteers had come forward to take on the facilitation of small groups of people wanting to explore reducing their carbon footprint. This was the 4th such weekend we’ve run and we’re definitely crafting a stronger training each time. We […]
