Category: facilitation

From the Archives: Reflections on the FbD Learning Series

Screen shot of four videos from Floodplains by Design's "Collaboration Campfires"

Along time ago and in a place far far away, I supported an awesome network of folks at Floodplains by Design. When the pandemic hit we did a lot of the proverbial pivoting. Network work often entails a lot of meetings and we moved everything online. We ran a series of online facilitation workshops in 2020 and in 2021 and lo and behold today I resurfaced the videos of the sessions. The 2020 series was positioned as “Virtual Coffees” and the 2021 series was called the “Collaboration Campfire!” If you are so inclined, take a stroll through the videos here: https://vimeo.com/user142408470

Here are a few of the things that stand out for me from those two years of constant pivoting.

  • A small but consistent core of community leaders are the glue that enables intermittent and even one time participation to have value.  Our co-chairs and core members provided consistency, stability and network weaving through their wonderful relationships.
  • The community core (plus guests) designs as a TEAM, not the external facilitator designing and delivering. Team design yields experiences that meet a range of needs rather than one championed by a single designer.
  • Find that balance between process and content. Content is essential for the technical floodplains work, but the social bonds between members is nurtured through process.
  • Vary the process, but not everything, all the time. We used a lot of Liberating Structures and we would try and use a structure more than once, but not the same set or string of structures every time. This gave both comfort (familiarity) and variety. More importantly, it built capacity for folks to go back and use the process on their home turf. Or river, as it were.
  • Don’t over-pack the agenda. Oi, some day we will all integrate this learning into our practices!
  • Reflect and learn after every round. There is always room for new insights and ways of doing things.
  • Celebrate!

From the Archives: Sensing Our Changing Roles

Well this little post has tried to be born into the world twice. Time to give it light. I’m going to leave it exactly as it was with it’s last draft date of 2015. Seems to me the image suggests so much that is relevant today!

A blog post from Peggy Holman on  Changing Roles in Changing Times from way back in February of 2014, came across my screen today and triggered one of those moments “blog this, Nancy!” While Peggy’s post was about the changing roles in journalism, the image she included from the Berkana Institute was what caught my eye.

From Peggy Holman, adapted from Berkana Institute's

From the Archives: Visual and Audio “Getting Into Online meetings” Ideas

Back in 2020 and 2021 some of my friends and colleagues refused to get stuck in the same-old, same-old of starting meetings online. Fisher Qua showed me a Music Labs experimental tool and playing with it (in this clip) opened possibilities of co-creating visually and aurally that could start a meeting in a way that immediately changed our participation and experience.

A bit wild, sure, but why do we seek so much to maintain the status quo? Why do we snap back to the safe, predictable, without even considering if it is still useful? Time for more creative destruction. Make space for something that is more useful. What meeting starting habits have you creatively destroyed? What new practices emerged from that space you created?

Snapback, Falling off Horses, Toxic Nostalgia and What Do We Do Next?

Picture of a horses nose and mouth with bridle on.

Today is my birthday. Always a good time for reflection….

How do we discern what practices to keep and which to throw away? What have we noticed in our changing practices since the pandemic and how do we make the MOST of them? Or not! Are we wallowing in toxic nostalgia?

Dr. David Viscott, author of a book entitled Emotional Resilience, defined toxic nostalgia as “a subtle mixture of feelings, attitudes, perspectives and needs from different ages all showing themselves at once as the unresolved past attempts to define the present.” I found Dr. Viscott;s quote via Rabbi Mike Harvey. Rabbi Harvey also made his own offering describing toxic nostalgia is “thinking that things used to be amazing, focusing only on good memories, and defining the past by those good memories, then projecting the difference between the reality of the present with the imagined reality of your past and seeing the difference. “

Once I started looking, toxic nostalgia shows up in the media a lot lately. I felt resonance. Think about our societal polarization on so many issues. Our blindness as we endorse things that do us harm.

For me and my group process practice we use the term “snapback.” Snapback to the old, familiar, comfortable ways – even if those old ways are no longer serving. For groups working together, the pandemic tossed us out of our familiar ways and ruts and many of us rapidly embraced new ways. Now that things are leaking back into old settings (i.e. F2F offices, meetings) the snapback is showing up. I’m noticing that some of the groups I worked with during the pandemic where they created and adopted new, productive practices, are slipping back into high control, low liberating practices.

If we don’t examine and compare our practices, we may default to toxic nostalgia and snapback. Or we can stay awake, notice what has changed and how that change has or has not positively impacted what we are trying to do together. We fear “falling off the horse,” but perhaps what we should fear is not noticing with either got back on or fell off the horse and learned NOTHING!

From the Archives: Alone, Together, Silent, Vocal, Collaborative

Image of a piece of paper with "freedom and responsibility" written on it
freedom and responsibility

Ah, 2017, such a quaint time when we still used Adobe Connect. 🙂 It was a pleasure to go back and re-read Jenny Mackness’ post, The power of silent learners | Jenny Connected.

While the post and the webinar it reflects upon focus on learning/education contexts, there is a lot we can extrapolate to today’s mix of online and F2F. It is always good to remind me, a person who thinks by talking (which is not just being an extrovert!), that people experience the world in different ways and we can use that diversity and design for it, or try to put it in a box. NOT!

The post gives a detailed report on the webinar Jenny attended, and why she liked it. What I like about her post is this question:

The main thought I have come away with is to question whether it helps silent learners to focus on them in this way. Jan Willem felt it does, because he feels that there is not enough recognition of what silent learners can offer. For me the danger is that in doing this we may reinforce the view that somehow silent learners are a problem and that we need to solve this problem by enabling them, empowering them, to become a bit noisier. Personally, I don’t think that learners can be empowered by others. They empower themselves, although they can be supported in doing this.

I appreciate Jenny’s observation. The more we try and HELP people, the more we risk actually diminishing them.

It appears that the day I saved the URL to Jenny’s post, I also saw something from Fast Company that suggests we avoid the binaries of alone/together, introvert/extroverts and use a pattern of small/large group alternation.

“The way to maximize creative potential is to flow between being alone and being in a group, and back again.”

This resonates with my approach to group facilitation and is, indeed, part of the fundamental patterns of approaches such as Liberating Structures. As noted in a previous post, this allows for nuance and context.