Graphic Facilitators – Rosviz is back!

Michelle Laurie and I are excited to announce the 3rd annual graphic facilitation workshop (aka Rosviz!) in beautiful Rossland, BC, Canada, July 18-20th, 2012. We had so much fun at #1 and #2, we are going for #3! (See Sylvia’s great video from #2 here.)

Drawing on Walls at the 2011 Graphic Facilitation Workshop in Rossland, B.C.

You are invited to this experiential workshop which takes place almost entirely at the drawing surface!

We’ll start the evening of July18th by warming up our drawing muscles and silencing those pesky inner censors. The second day, we’ll build into the basic practices of graphic facilitation and recording. We will pay attention to preparation, the actual visual work, and follow up including digital capture of paper based images. Our third day will be devoted to participatory graphic approaches, practicing and giving peer feedback. You can expect to go away with icons, ideas and approaches which you can use immediately, as well as ideas about how to hone your practice.

When might we use this practice?

Sometimes our imaginations are sparked by a visual where words fail us. Think about when communities plan and imagine their futures, when teams consider the possible outcomes for their projects, when groups create maps to track their progress.  These are all opportunities to use visuals to engage and deepen community dialogue. You can use visual thinking to improve teamwork, communications, meetings, build engagement and to plan work. Step out of the PowerPoint rut!

Who should attend?
Facilitators, project managers, team leaders and members, town planners, teachers and anyone who would like to engage others beyond words.

Please Note: You do NOT need previous experience or have to consider yourself an artist. At some level, we can all draw and use visuals to enhance our communications and engage diverse audiences.

Quick details: Michelle will be hosting and we’ll both be co-facilitating. This 2.5 day workshop begins the evening of Wednesday, July 18th and ends mid-afternoon on Friday, July 20th.  Early bird pricing before April 1st is CA $690.00 and is CA $840.00 thereafter. (US Friends — it is about the same in dollars! If you have/want to pay in dollars, I can take those. NW)  Email Michelle to register: michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com.

via Workshop Alert – Rosviz is back! | Michelle Laurie rants and raves.

Monday Video: Small Gestures Are Worth It

MLK Google Icon
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Via Bernie DeKoven on Google+ comes this fabulous video about how the South African hamburger chain, Wimpys, rolled out their new Braille restaurant menus. Bernie has the talent for finding things that make me smile, but this one goes deeper as well.

I was tempted to use U2’s amazing video of their song about Martin Luther King (1984) as for my “Monday Video” as today is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday here in the US. But I like the actions of the Wimpy video. Actions that speak, as they say, louder than words. Watch first:

 

The opening bit is “small gestures are worth it.” In all my years facilitating and leading, the story of the ACTION almost always comes back to small gestures. It may be big or small ideas that get us going, but the small gestures get us there.

My early geographical community leadership work found legs when I learned things like mirroring to better hear and understand what others were saying – usually with a small gesture that started with eye contact, leaning in to listen, and paraphrasing to work towards understanding. When I first started facilitating online around 1997, the simple act of welcoming and reciprocating opened up the magic of text based asynchronous conversation. As I returned to more face to face meeting facilitation, again the gestures of showing that I was listening, of helping make the act of “being heard, seen and loved” central to group interaction proved powerful. More powerful than any method or tool.

I’m sure you have stories of the power of small gestures. I’d love to read them in a comment or through a link. 😉

Sometimes small gestures take the tiniest amounts of thought and energy. Sometimes they are deep, profound gifts (like placing sesame seeds on a bun to spell in Braille.) What I know, is they are worth it. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Questions That Frame Responsibility

I subscribe to the Strachan-Tomlinson Question of the Week email which sends out a provocative question (or form of question). They get me thinking and help me with one of THE most important facilitation/leadership/working skills I know of: asking questions. I’m not great at asking questions and am always seeking to improve my practice.

I have been intrigued by questions that help frame responsibility in a group, rather setting up an expectation that the convenors, facilitators, leaders, whatever — are responsible for everything. That is rubbish. This week’s question does that for me:

Question of the week | January 11, 2012

Ask “What is one thing you do not want to see happen
in this session”

This question enables participants to voice their concerns and contribute to norm setting in a group. Responses may also yield potential insights for the facilitator about previous group process experiences of participants. To bring this discussion to a positive conclusion, ask participants what they need to do to avoid what they don’t want to see happen in a session. This will result in people setting positive norms for working together. See Making Questions Work, Chapter 4, “Questions for Opening a Session”, p 88.

This reminds me of a question Peter Block  asked at the Nexus for Change gathering in 2008. It was something to the effect of “if this meeting (project, etc) were to be a failure, what would your role be in that failure? The guts of these questions all point to the idea of everyone getting “skin in the game.” Owning it. Not simply applauding or rejecting from the side. IN THE GAME. It is too easy to sit back and criticize. It is harder to foster the conditions, to create the invitation and ask the questions that get them to engage and own it. That’s why I like these questions.

For more on questions and methods that encourage ownership and responsibility, see:

Updates from Communities and Networks Connection

I’m continuing cleaning up and adapting my  technology configuration this week. Here is part 2!

I confess, I don’t pay nearly enough attention to all the good things flying past me, including things on my own Communities and Networks Connection. In case this is new to you, this is an aggregation project led by Tony Karrer. He set up a system that lets me curate content from a wide variety of bloggers interested in communities and networks (If you aren’t on the list and want to be, drop me a line!). Tony just let me know that Aggregage, the platform that powers has some new features that are now on the  Communities and Networks Connection.  Announcing the PERSONALIZATION ENGINE! That means that Communities and Networks Connection now allows you to sign-up and have your content personalized based on their interests. You can sign-up via the “Personalize Your Content” button on the right side of the interface shown on the right side of the picture on the right (right, right?).

Tony has explained it well on his site, so I’m quoting the master. He refers to his own aggregation site, eLearning Learning 

Now with personalization it’s even better. The picture below gives a sense of what’s happening:

Aggregage-Personalization

Curators handle finding the best sources of content.  The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views.  These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc.  Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content.  You can read a bit more about these aspects in eLearning Learning Launches New Features.

What’s new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information.   The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share.  It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing.  You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below:

eLearning-Learning-Subscription

This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity.  You can always visit and manually select interests as well.  You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained.

The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you:

  • Social signal score – are people in the audience finding it interesting
  • Topic match – does it match up with your interests
  • Like sharing – are individuals who are like you sharing this

The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters.

The reason that I’m most exited about this is that I partly use eLearning Learning to make sure I don’t miss things that is good content that is relevant to me.  Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by.

I also personally like the format of the new newsletter.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

So I’ll add my pitch – give it a try and let me  know what you think. In the mean time, here is the best of Communities and Networks Connection 2011


Hot Topics for 2011
2011 (4593)
People (2501)
Social (2225)
Share (1603)
Sharing (1603)
World (1555)
Change (1546)
Networks (1534)
Community (1515)
Difference (1467)
Business (1431)
Development (1425)
Management (1349)
May (1324)
Media (1298)
Information (1296)
Open (1240)
P2P (1220)
Learning (1191)
Groups (1181)

Visual New Year’s Resolutions from Woody Guthrie (and Steve)

I meant to post this 10 days ago — natch, but here it is…
Take a look at these new years resolutions from Woody Guthrie which came via my friend Steve, who is really smart and seems to resonate with the universe in some mysterious way. 😉

new years resolutions from woody guthrie - omenti

I don’t do resolutions per se. But I have been cleaning my office. 😉 And blogging more! (At least until the travel ramps up again.)

Happy New Years!

 

P.S. See Diego Leal’s New Years video here:  http://youtu.be/QI9FoH6rhms