Archive for the ‘Meeting Management’ Category
Facilitating Event Planning for a Distributed Team
. Recently I have been talking to several clients that are seeking facilitation services for the planning of events that are a month or two away and are looking for assistance in convening geographically diverse teams in planning the events. Having planned many regional and national conferences over my 17 plus ...Read More
Facilitating Advisory Groups: Labels & Social Contracts
. When convening a group, two of the primary tasks of a facilitator are to clearly articulate the label that is applied to the group and to create an appropriate social contract between group members. The terms “workgroup,” “taskforce,” “coalition” and “advisory group” are labels that are often used loosely and ...Read More
Facilitating for Government & Governance
. Over the course of my career I have studied with many talented facilitation mentors from both the organizational development world and the world of community organization. Studying and, more importantly, practicing in both worlds has helped me develop an understanding that there are two facilitation disciplines that require different sets ...Read More
Using Taxonomies in Facilitation
. Thinking ahead to the new year? Check out the services Facilitation & Process, LLC offers. Also follow the Resource of the Day on Twitter . If you have been following this blog, you likely already know that my goal is to move beyond “Facilitation 101” and focus on the deeper context of facilitation, which I ...Read More
Managing Documentation: A Key Facilitation Skill
. I once served on an advisory group process that spanned a number of months and consisted of a steering committee, a workgroup, three subcommittees and a couple of ad hoc committees. I was not the facilitator but a participant and as the weeks unfolded, I found myself increasingly frustrated by ...Read More
Facilitating Community Engagement: Skills and Competencies
. I have been fortunate enough through my career to have sat as a member of community coalitions and advisory groups that were highly effective. In my Master's degree program I studied community engagement processes and been mentored by some very skilled community leaders. I have also had the fortune of ...Read More
Rapid Framing as a Facilitation Competency
. More than once, I been in a meeting where ideas are being fostered -- convergent and divergent -- and the facilitator is fielding comments, writing notes and after the conversation runs its course, three or four easel chart pages latter, everyone pauses and it becomes clear that the group is ...Read More
Visual Learning In Facilitation
. Have you ever encountered a facilitator whom over the course of a meeting wrote down lots of words on easel-pad paper, filled up the wall space with page after page of notes and at the end of the meeting simply transcribed the notes into a word processing document or worse, ...Read More
Facilitating Collaboration: Five Potential Models
. Facilitators are often called in to help design projects involving multiple stakeholders such as in convening interdepartmental workgroups, cross-functional teams or inter-agency committees and coalitions. For these assignments one of the key assessments that the facilitator needs to make is to determine whether the convening is for the purpose of ...Read More
Workplan Development Process
. I believe that a workplan is a critical component of process improvement but is often under-resourced in the planning process. For example, I was recently asked to facilitate a meeting for an interdepartmental team that was in the early stages of operationalzing a major quality improvement initiative. The described goal ...Read More