I’m just home from some marathon travels, with my blog dusty and neglected. As a first bit of blog love, I want to STRONGLY ENCOURAGE all my facilitation friends and colleagues to look at Chris Corrigan’s terrific post on designing group process with introverts in mind.
As a process designer, creating good meeting and learning spaces for introverts has long been a blind spot for me. Facilitators by definition bring people together. If we are extroverted, the processes we design can often contain an overwhelming amount of social interaction for introverts which actually alienates them from the group and marginalizes their contributions. Sometimes I have run meetings where the introverts never contributed at all. That wasn’t through their fault – it was the fault of my process design that never took their learning styles into account.
You might call it extrovert privilege.
via Designing with introverts in mind « Chris Corrigan.
Read the whole thing. Really. And I’d add after three weeks in three different African countries, there are some really interesting cultural aspects to this as well. I’ll save that for later.
Now I’ll be quiet.
Via Twitter (), Sreya Dutta @sreyadutta notes:
@sreyadutta, based on my own experience when I was not attentive to those more introverted people, I did NOT facilitate space for them to engage in a way they wished. As a more extroverted personality, I know I can “run over” people. So perhaps this is not needed by you. You may really be good at finding ways to hold space for all kinds of people.
Some of us need help seeing ourselves to be able to better see others. For me there is always room for growth and improvement!