2 Skills to Listen Like a Facilitator
A facilitator's job is to pull knowledge out of the people in the room, rather than pushing content. This means setting aside our tendencies to give advice or solve problems and simply listen. In this blog, we discuss how this is done using two simple techniques: paraphrasing and asking questions.
Reframing Team Decision-Making: Collaborative Decisions Made Easy
Most teams know how to have a successful brainstorming session. Coming up with ideas usually isn’t the challenge; it’s how to decide what to do with the ideas where they get stuck. In this blog, we break down different types of decisions and different collaboration methods that can help you make the right choice.
Finding Alignment: Rediscovering an Organization’s Identity
Just like people, organizations can lose their identity when they grow and reinvent themselves. When this happens, it’s time to pause and reflect on where we are and where we need to be.
Chaos to Clarity: 4 Ways of Grouping Ideas
Navigating through a sea of sticky note ideas can feel like trying to organize confetti after a New Year’s bash. In this blog, we break down four methods for grouping ideas and demonstrate how to turn those groups into actionable themes and insights you can use after your brainstorming session.
How to (Politely) Interrupt in a Meeting: Tips for Staying on Time
Stop getting stuck listening to the same person drone on in your team meetings. Try these strategies for politely interrupting when someone is hogging air time, and it’s time to move on with the meeting.
A Strategic Checklist for Anchoring a New Project or Startup
Kicking off a new project can be messy. You’re full of enthusiasm for a new opportunity, but now you're wondering, where do I start? In our latest Meeting Story, we unpack our process for helping the Ginsburg Institute for Health Equity build their team and create a vision for the future, and we share our strategic planning checklist.
Atomic (Meeting) Habits: Committing to Good Meeting Behavior
Changing how you show up in a meeting is as difficult as swapping pizza for salad. Let’s approach changing meeting habits like we approach making any change in our lives.
Making Company Values Meaningful
Company values are empty words unless your team members can see themselves in them. In this meeting story, we explain how a history chart and values storytelling activity helped ground the team at CG Strategy in appreciation for their company history and values.
Boosting Team Connection: Meeting Makeover for the Return-to-Office
Meeting rhythms define the types of meetings a team uses, when and how frequently they meet, who needs to be there and what needs to be prepared in advance. If you’re faced with bringing team members together during a return to the office, consider a team-norming session to help re-establish working relationships and set new agreements for how your team can be successful.
Looking Back to Move Forward: Future Search as a Meeting Arc
We have to come to terms with the past before we can agree on current realities. Future Search is a strategic planning and group facilitation process designed to help organizations and communities address complex issues and create a shared vision for the future.
How Visual Tools Helped Create a New Vision and Roadmap
Strategic planning meetings require techniques that ensure all voices can be heard and all ideas can be mapped so that the right decisions can be made using these ideas. In this meeting story, we break down how we did this in collaboration with the Mid-Atlantic Facilitator Network.
Meetings that “Move”: Using Movement to Increase Productivity
Movement promotes higher brain function, better behavior and lower stress. Adding movement to meetings allows people to perform well under pressure, make better decisions and work better with others. Here are a few of our favorite energizers you can use to get your team or participants moving.
Meeting Co-lab: Meeting Tips for Participants with Tricia Conyers
How can you facilitate when you’re not the person leading meeting? Check out this webinar with Lauren Green (MeetingMakers) and Tricia Conyers (Island Inspiration Ltd.) for advice and skills you can use in your next experience as a meeting participant.
10 Tips for Partnering with a Facilitator
Often the people we work with don’t have a clear sense of what we provide when it comes to facilitation, and every facilitator is a little different. Our goal as MeetingMakers is to take the stress of identifying the process to achieve your outcomes off your plate. Here are a few things to keep in mind so you can get the most from working with a professional facilitator.
How Collaboration Happens
Many people think true collaboration is a form of magic. But collaboration—bringing together unique skills and ideas toward a common goal—is something made possible by better meetings; meetings with an intentional design and basic facilitation techniques that anyone can learn and do.
How a Community-Driven Meeting Led to Results in Houston
An article published in June 2022 in The New York Times celebrates the city of Houston for doing “twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade,” according to a 2020 federal report. How did they do it? The answer is intentional and consistent collaboration, starting with whole-systems intervention.
6 Tips to Un-Suck Your Meetings
We’ve all attended our share of meetings and trainings that suck. It can feel like a waste of time and energy. Despite what you might think, these sessions are not pointless; they just aren’t being planned well or maybe even planned at all. Planning a meeting that doesn’t suck is easy with just a few preparation steps and basic facilitation skills.
WEBINAR: Introduction to Facilitating with Visuals
Visuals are central to facilitating engaging meetings, but many facilitators and trainers lack a strong design muscle. Stop making boring, meaningless slide decks and start bringing visuals into your meetings in a fun, purposeful and creative way that will have a real impact on improving the outcomes of your meeting.
PODCAST: Do Your Meetings Suck? (Lauren Green on The Biz Dojo)
In this episode of The Biz Dojo, Seth Anderson, J.P. Gaston and Lauren Green explore some common issues with meetings, what can make them better, and how visual notetaking is a complete game-changer to creating connection between meeting goers and the content.
3 Visual Energizers for In-Person and Online Meetings
Energizers are the glue that keeps your agenda together, especially virtually. Energizers should always have a purpose, whether building connections, testing technology, or modeling behavior. Here are three of our favorite visual energizers to use in meetings.
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