Facilitation Training for Youth Age 15-30

ICA Associates offers incredible facilitation training. Their affiliated youth branch at ICA Canada runs a practically free training program for youth aged 15-30. Their next trainings are offered Oct. 24th, and Nov. 7th and 8th.

You can read all about it here.

The Secret Ingredient

Last week, I posted about how excited I was to design a facilitated event completely from scratch, completely my own. It’s happening tonight, which is why I’m glad that yesterday evening I remembered the secret ingredient.

No event has ever gone badly when I brought homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Here is my mother’s recipe, which I committed to memory years ago, and which I’ll be using tonight.

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup butter
• vanilla – enough
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups flour
• baking powder – enough
• baking soda – enough
• salt – enough
• 4 cups rolled oats (optional: grind them up in a blender first)
• chocolate chips – enough

Cream together the sugar, eggs, vanilla, and butter. In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. Add the sugar, eggs, and butter mixture to the mixed dry ingredients. Stir in the rolled oats and the chocolate chips.

Bake at 350/375, for long enough (8-12 minutes).

Complete Design Freedom

My usual facilitation gigs require designing to someone else’s specifications, timelines, goals, org culture, and values. That’s all good, but sometimes it makes me feel boxed in. But in the next few weeks, I’m going to be running an event that’s all my own – my goals, my design, and whatever the heck I want.

The freedom is intoxicating! Here are a few of the ingredients that I want to have in my own facilitation recipe:

1. Get the right people in the room. I want people who represent a variety of viewpoints, life experiences, and familiarity with the subject matter. I want to be able to say in my invitation to each one of those people exactly why I want them in the room, and acknowledge what I know they’ll bring.

2. Prework! Designing my own event, I can give myself as much advance time as I want to figure out if there needs to be prereading, information sent out, materials we’ll need, etc.

3. Space set up! Along with prework, having my own timeline means I can spend the time creating a space that’s conducive to gathering, sharing ideas, and provoking good conversation. A few years ago someone said to me, “I love how when I go to a session facilitated by Laura, it’s already started before I get in the room” – meaning that the walls were already decorated with quotes, questions, ideas; the tables were moved aside; the chairs were in a circle; supplies were laid out.

4. Right brain. I’m so tired of bullet point lists, log frames, prioritizations, schedules, and reality. Yes, there is a place for all of those, but I also want a place for music, art, imagery, and story-telling. I want to play the piano while the introverts take time to reflect, I want to draw pictures of what I’m hearing while an extrovert tells a story, I want to see people exaggerate their body language until it becomes the loudest communication in the room.

All of that, and I haven’t even listed any of the activities yet! Those will have to come in a future post.

Facilitation: See it, Hear it, Touch it

Last night ended the first year of my psychotherapist training program. I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned and noticed about facilitation through going through these classes.

The course was almost entirely auditory: 90% of the classes were discussion-based. For someone like me, who is predominantly an auditory learner, you’d think this would be a great system. However, just because you’re talking doesn’t mean you’re reaching the auditory learner. The auditory learner listens to what you’re saying, meaning that it needs to make sense. There needs to be main points. There needs to be verbal signals (“First we will talk about x, then y”, or “The point of this story is …” “To summarize the presentation …”). The auditory learner actually pays attention to the verbal flow and the words of the argument, and less attention to your gestures or to the colourful and descriptive phrases you’re using.

In some of our weekend workshops, we did more kinesthetic and visual activities. If you haven’t tried incorporating such activities into your own groups or workshops, I highly recommend it. You’ll get an entirely different take on a topic if, instead of asking for open discussion, you ask people to draw a response and then present it. You’ll gain an entirely different understanding of perspectives if you ask people to articulate their viewpoint through a gesture, body position, or sculpture.

People new to facilitation are often reluctant to deviate from the traditional discussion-based approach, fearing that pictures or movement won’t address their topic or will be uncomfortable for participants. I strongly believe that we are missing out on entire ways of knowing and ways of being if we don’t include such representations. Try it, and trust the process – you’ll be pleased and surprised with what unfolds.

Healthy Groups: Task Functions and Maintenance Functions

The Change Agency makes a useful distinction between task functions and maintenance functions in a group. Whether you’re a group participant or a facilitator, having some of these different functions on a checklist (mentally or externalized) will help ensure that 1) the group gets done what it needs to get done; and 2) it does so in a way that nourishes and enriches the participants.

Sample task functions include initiating activity, coordinating, summarising, and diagnosing. Sample maintenance functions include reducing tension, consensus-testing, harmonising, and encouraging.

Many facilitators and participants will lean one way or the other in their tendency to support different behaviours. For example, my natural strength is in the group maintenance functions, and I’ve consciously learned skills in the task maintenance functions. Which set of skills are your natural habitat? Which skills do you need to develop in order to bring both analytics and harmony to your groups?

“Think Passion, Integrity, Authenticity, Collaboration”

I’ve been reading Fierce Conversations. The preface opens with:

When you think of a fierce conversation, think passion, integrity, authenticity, collaboration. Think cultural transformation.

Think of leadership.

I’ve been slow to post lately, and part of it is because I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly I have been learning about working in and with groups. I know the learning is happening, because I’m seeing changes in myself as both a facilitator and a participant. As I read over Susan Scott’s principles for fierce conversation, I thought, “Hmm, maybe that’s it. I am engaging in conversations in a fiercer way [think passion, integrity, authenticity, collaboration].”

Here are, from the book, Scott’s Seven Principles of Fierce Conversations:

1. Master the courage to interrogate reality.
2. Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real.
3. Be here, prepared to be nowhere else.
4. Tackle your toughest challenge today.
5. Obey your instincts.
6. Take responsibility for your emotional wake.
7. Let silence do the heavy lifting.

Reread the above list. Are you ready to incorporate one of those principles – or all of those principles – into some of your conversations today?

The Power of Questions: What Versus Why

Someone once told me that questions that start with “Why?” activate explanations and justifications. We are very good at explaining why we do things. We are talented when it comes to justifying why we don’t do things. We have lots of practice rationalizing to ourselves – and others – why we feel the way we do. We already have a myriad of mental scripts in our heads, just waiting to be played back. When someone asks you a “Why?” question, it activates what you already know and believe.

My education taught me to ask “Why?” questions. It taught me to seek out explanations, to be analytical, and to question justifications. Since I started working as a coach and facilitator, though, I’ve abandoned the “Why?” question. My clients don’t need to justify themselves to me. And if I ask questions that activate what they already know and believe, we aren’t discovering anything new. We’re just reinforcing existing mental scripts.

I’ve realized: when I ask a “What?” question instead, it opens up possibilities.

Listen to the difference:

Suppose a workplace facilitator asks a team: “Why are we focusing on this topic?”

The group responds with what we already know: business reasons, evidence, anecdotes. All of the reasons that put the topic on the agenda in the first place. The answers summarize everything we already believe.

What if the facilitator asks a “What?” question instead: “What will become possible for us if we focus on this topic?”

Suddenly, the answers change! The team is no longer sitting comfortably in the space of what we already know and our tidy logical explanations. Suddenly, we’re moved to a sense of possibility and openness. A sense that what we are doing matters to the future we are creating together.

What would it look like to ask yourself a “What?” question? Here are a few to get you started:

What would it look like if I . . .?

What would become possible if I . . .?

What is important to me about . . .?

The Killer Phrase: words that grind teams to a halt

“We’ve tried that before.”

“Put it in writing.”

“Get a committee to look at it.”

Australia’s The Change Agency (“listen deeply, reflect critically, strategise effectively, make change happen”) turned me on to the idea of the killer phrase. Killer phrases reduce possibility and inhibit creativity. They put an end to something, before the something has even started.

The Change Agency offers advice for groups that suffer from the killer phrase. I especially like these recommendations:

Institutionalize the term. Get some friendly groans going in the room as everyone brainstorms the killer phrases that their group loves to hide behind. Once the term is institutionalized and the phrases identified, have the team come up with a way of discouraging the use of any killer phrase. (The Change Agency suggests throwing wads of paper at the perpetrator).

Find the underlying cause of the killer phrase. Is the killer phrase camouflaging a valuable question? Searching out the question, rather than accepting the killer phrase, can lead to more possibility. (The Change Agency’s example: turning “We don’t have the resources,” into “How can we mobilise the resources to do this?”)

I’ve worked in groups with their own idiosyncratic killer phrases, and I’m sure I contributed a few of my own. In fact, in co-active coaching we have a similar concept for that internal voice that’s full of killer phrases: we call it the saboteur. Like the killer phrases, if the saboteur is taken at face value, it will kill possibility. And, like with killer phrases, there is often an underlying, important, valid concern underneath the saboteur’s voice.

I started wondering what my own internal “killer phrases” are. What does my inner saboteur say to me that kills my sense of possibility? I quickly recognized a few of my own killer phrases: “You don’t have the energy to do that.” “You don’t have the skills to do that.” “You aren’t outgoing or enthusiastic enough to run your own business.”

It was refreshing to write those down and get them out, actually! Now I can strategize on how to vanquish my killer phrases.

What are your killer phrases? How do you overcome them?

(Thanks to Jasmine at Stepwise Heritage and Tourism for passing along The Change Agency link!)

Approaching With Appreciation

As a coach and facilitator, one methodology I use is Appreciative Inquiry. As Wikipedia explains:

Appreciative Inquiry utilizes a 4-stage process focusing on:

1. Discover: The identification of organizational processes that work well.

2. Dream: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.

3. Design: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.

4. Destiny (or Deliver): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t. It is the opposite of problem solving. Instead of focusing on fixing what’s wrong, AI focuses on how to create more of what’s already working.

This week, I read about a psychology study that reminded me of why Appreciative Inquiry works. Researchers assigned subjects to solve a maze, with a cartoon mouse pictured in the centre who was trying to get out of the maze. Half the subjects saw that when the mouse got out of the maze, it would get to a yummy piece of cheese. The other half of the subjects saw that when the mouse got out of the maze, an owl was ready to swoop down and eat the yummy mouse.

Although all the subjects successfully solved the maze in a similar amount of time, the two groups showed distinct aftereffects from the activity:

When the participants later took a test of creativity, those who had helped their mouse avoid the owl turned in scores that were fifty percent lower than the scores of students who had helped their mouse find the cheese. The state of mind elicited by attending to the owl had resulted in a lingering sense of caution, avoidance, and vigilance for things going wrong. This mind-state in turn weakened creativity, closed down options, and reduced the students’ flexibility in responding to the next task.

. . . The same action . . . has different consequences depending on whether it’s done to move toward something we welcome (activating the brain’s approach system) or to avoid something negative (activating the brain’s avoidance system). In the maze experiment, aversion was triggered by something as minor as the sight of a cartoon owl. It led to reductions in exploratory, creative behaviors. This is dramatic evidence that the avoidance system can narrow the focus of our lives, even when triggered by a purely symbolic threat.

-The Mindful Way Through Depression, p. 124-125

The coach within me invites you to ask yourself: Where in your life or organization are you narrowing your focus by acting to avoid something? What possibilities might open up if you shifted your actions to highlight what you are approaching, rather than what you are avoiding?

Short Courses for Facilitators

In The Workshop Book: from individual creativity to group action, Brian Stanfield lists a number of “short courses” facilitators can use. A short course is ideally just one sentence that contains the wisdom that the group needs at that moment. Any longer than a sentence, Stanfield warns, and you are venturing into lecture territory rather than facilitating.

Here are some short courses he provides. A facilitator can pull these one sentence zingers out of their hat, gently, when necessary:

1. You do not have to agree with any piece of data. You do need to understand it or try to understand it so that you can authentically dialogue with it.

2. The whole picture is attained through hearing and understanding all the perspectives.

3. There will be conflicts. Many are surface conflicts from not understanding each other’s perspectives and experiences.

4. Use your public voice so that everyone can hear and participate.

(p.139)