Category: Facilitation

This is the third time this week someone has asked me about The Story Spine, so I thought I’d share it here. It’s not my idea – I first found it on the web and then learnt more about it from Kat Koppett’s excellent book Training to Imagine. I’ve used it with groups for reflecting,…

In a recent comment about facilitator language Johnnie Moore wrote: I just find it incredibly hard to define facilitation and I think our efforts to do so can be counter-productive. I’m very wary of saying facilitators bring special skills to bear. I don’t think it’s ultimately about either skills and certainly not about knowledge about…

Last night I hung out for a few hours with other facilitators (what is the collective noun for facilitators? a rabble of facilitators? a host of facilitators?) at one of the regular Victorian Facilitator Network meetings. Andrew Rixon and cartoonist/illustrator extraordinaire (and long time friend) Simon Keebone took us through the process of creating a…

Earlier this year, Andrew and Sascha Rixon and I collaborated on a paper about facilitator language. It was published in the IAF Journal (you can download a copy of the paper here. Our major finding was that there actually is a special type of language that facilitators use that is different from other ‘business’ or…

I love using technology but rarely have any idea how or why it works – and the complexity gets too much for me sometimes. I’ve just gone wireless at home and am loving it! This video on Wiki’s in Plain English is simply brilliant – a great way of using technology to explain technology. I’m…

I was just reading a birding mag and it struck me that the skills required to be a good birdwatcher – patience, knowing where to look, knowing what distinguising features to look for, having an idea of the terrain and likely birds you’ll encounter, having a good field guide to check your observations, and travelling…

The article in the Melbourne Age that Sascha referred to was called “The PowerPoint of no return” by Christopher Scanlon of RMIT University. Technologies…shape what we think about, how we think about it, and, more importantly, how we relate to the world around us. The book referred to is The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by…

Lenny Diamond, Tim Karpoff of GFSC and Geoff McFarlane and I have just finished delivering three Disaster & Crisis Intervention workshops for facilitators. It was quite a journey – working with people I haven’t worked with before delivering a course I’ve only ever participated in. It was fun and we innovated all along. None of…