Workshops: Practicing Facilitation Techniques

We created a new workshop to practice facilitation techniques that easily apply to many different situations while looking at how proper facilitating parallels with guidelines in transformational leadership.

The objectives of the workshop were:

  1. Focus on and practice three facilitation techniques. All these facilitation techniques can access the knowledge and skills from the participants.
    • Using a talking stick
    • Crowd Sourcing
    • Creating smaller groups
  2. Know where to find the tools for new facilitation techniques. (That is the purpose of this post)
  3. Identify how transformational leadership aligns with facilitating groups. 

Transformational Leadership Guidelines used:

We are referencing specifically the book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky. This is a terrific book with tools for bringing transformational leadership to change yourself, your organizations, and your surroundings.

  1. Get to the Balcony
  2. Determine the Ripeness of the Issue in the System
  3. Ask, Who am I in This Picture?
  4. Think Hard About Your Framing
  5. Hold Steady
  6. Analyze the Factions That Begin to Emerge
  7. Keep the Work at the Center of People’s Attention

 

Facilitation Technique One: Using a talking stick

Talking sticks or center points for someone to use in replace of a talking stick are useful for many reasons.  Here are 5 great reasons. Really, they are great for providing space for someone to talk and others space to listen.  Talking sticks can easily be brought into other conversation formats such as a fish bowl, conversation cafe, or board meetings.  We practiced using them in everyday conversations and how that changes the space.

Here are a couple other wonderful links about talking sticks:

Facilitation Technique Two: Crowdsourcing

We looked at how crowdsourcing can be used formally and informally.  Often, we need it informally to bring a group to one focal point or use it to find common ground as in basic conflict management.  The idea is to find out what each individual’s opinion is about a topic or argument and begin working from there.

When we need to document what a group’s ideas or action steps are, we tend to use more formal crowdsourcing.  We often see this happen on social media or on the street polling. For our workshop, we used the very useful 25/10 Crowdsourcing structure.  It is a lot of fun and gets a group uniquely working in a similar direction.

Facilitation Technique Three: Separation Techniques

Often the most skilled and knowledge filled people in a group is not the facilitator, but are the participants.  Many different fantastic facilitation structures are ones where participants are split into smaller groups, triads, or even pairs to work with each other.  To practice this, we used Troika Consulting.  It is an excellent way to get groups of three together and allow each participant equal time to focus on one single question or obstacle.

Other Separation Techniques include:

Many of the structures we use are Liberating Structures.  Check out how much we love Liberating Structures!

***If you would like more information on how Project Kinect can facilitate this or another one of our workshops for your team, email us: workshops@projectkinect.com.

Tools We Love: Fundraising Tips

How does an organization ask for funds when they have no data from a prior year to base the appeal off of?  This is a tricky situation. Many funders will not look twice. There are alternatives to going directly to a bank of foundation, but sometimes the quickest way are those routes.  Social Change Consulting provided a great article on Writing Fundraising Appeals Without Data From Your Prior Year.

The article narrows it down to three methods:

  • Storytelling

  • Use Future Goals

  • Share Highlights Segmented by Audience 

Check out the full article for great details and a great list of resources.

Voices We Love: Justin Simien

If you don’t know who Justin Simien is, then you may be familiar with his newest film, Dear White People. The movie is a satire about real issues of race that are very much present in our society.  The movie only grazes the issues, but presents it in a humorous and tasteful way.  Presenting these issues in such a way sets an atmosphere that will hopefully bring a more inclusive group to theater. Calandra Davis, an activist and soon-to-be contributor posted, “It felt good to a watch a movie that explored real issues and contained complex Black characters.”

Community mobilizing tool: Sometimes the issues need to be dealt with delicately in order to gain other important and invested allies.

Project Kinect loves this film for many reasons. First, it was crowd-funded. This genuine film was created by a community of supporters who wanted to see such a satire made. Second, and it is important to state this again; The film presents the issues in a way to bring more eyes to theaters. Most importantly, this film has been released at a time in our history when we must start having real, constructive conversations about racial tensions, modern racism, and white privilege.  If these conversations are not had, then we are doomed as a society and will not continue moving forward as a global leader. The possible actions and reactions if these issues are not discussed and worked on will be disastrous and we will look foolish to the rest of the world.  But for now, go see the film. 

**Photo credit goes to the Houston Chronicle.  Project Kinect loved the picture.  Click here to find the whole Houston Chronicle article.