Collective Wisdom: 9 actions for Ninja Facilitation

The Great thing about the Extraordinary Facilitation courses I run, is that they bring together many interesting people with a wide variety of facilitation experience.

At the beginning of every course we participate in an appreciative enquiry exercise which draws out our knowledge about what  makes facilitation extraordinary and what you could do more of, if you want more extraordinary.

Out of interest, I have compiled the results from at least 6 of these enquiries and it is remarkable how consistent the answers are.  I have boiled it down to 9 critical actions you can take to make your facilitation extraordinary.  The table below collates the original statements; the graphic above pulls it all together.

 

Get in touch if you want better resolution copies of these resources….

WHAT A FACILITATOR CAN DO TO GO FROM ORDINARY TO EXTRAORDINARY –  COMPILATION OF 6 plus COURSES
TAKE THE TIME Time and  creating space for unfolding
Time
Slowing down and allowing time
Taking time to reflect and use intuition
Not rushing things allow more time for ideas, discussion connection
Create space and time for mindfulness
Hone your time management and awareness
FOCUS ON THE WHY Focus and braveness
Bring clarity of purpose and clearly identify it
Know the why – what is the purpose
Focus (reducing workload or distractions)
CENTRE YOURSELF Focussed and regular self -reflection
Know what natural skills you bring
Where is your passion and energy coming from? – feed it and plug in
Step outside of yourself
Equanimity (avoiding imbalance)
Centred
Embrace vulnerability
Find the real bit of you, you can share or be today
Share and empower the group to share
Lose the imposter syndrome
Have faith and passion
Believe in yourself
Be aware of yourself
Clarity
refresh yourself
Self care
Self check = open
ROLE MODEL WHAT YOU NEED Model open risk taking behaviour “the stripped back exposure of humanity
Be a courageous example
Come from the heart – purposeful self disclosure
Speak from your truth making an invitation
Share
HEARKEN TO  THE GROUP Listen, really listen
Watch, really watch
Actively Listen
Sensitive, watchful, observant, tuned in
Be consciously aware of issues in the group – writing them out, looking at them, acting upon them
Be aware of the group
Deep curious listening to others and self
Acknowledge they may have other stuff going on
Have the eyes of a child
CREATE A CULTURE OF CONNECTION Nurture and enabling a group culture to develop as a priority
Pepeha or mihimihi
Invite people to bring a symbol or a story
More getting to know each other and icebreakers
Cultural symbolism matters, developing common language matters – music, symbolism, words
invite people to share
Safety
Clear outcomes expectations and boundaries
Create a safe space for people to engage for a common purpose – taking the time to draw out contributions
Connection
Build relationship
Humanize
Affirm and value emotional intelligence
Empower those with passion
Empower and sharing
Connection and trust
Break the ice
CREATIVELY AND AUTHENTICALLY ACTIVATE AND ENGAGE Activities and mixing it up to make it fun and engaging
Good food good place
Prioritising fun and lightness when designing
As enjoyable for everyone a possible
Creative thinking
Create opportunities
Get people outside
Movement
Engaging and funny – like a video clip
Evoke
More cool tools
Be open to trying new things
Real – real content
Create ways to engage deeply
Play – activities with a core focus on trust in order to build trust organically
Develop interaction and play
Make action
Get people Moving
Engage with the group
Create honeypots
Ask great questions
Less about content, more about enabling
Challenge
Lead by doing – everyone is in it together
Use questioning techniques that lead to self learning
Create activities and encourage them
NIMBLY RESPOND Manage turning points in the process, create enough structure and content, then be open to outcomes
Be receptive to the vibe and be flexible
Let go of attachment to outcomes
Trust and openness- no preconceived ideas
Be open
Change the state
Be responsive
Know what needs preparation
Open to change, flexible
Take risks, let go of rigidness
Noticing –  look out for the opportunity in the moment
See what is emergent for the diversity of the group
Go with the flow of each group
Relaxing control
KEEP LEARNING THROUGH DOING AND REFLECTION Practice
Feedback loops and reviews
Try, reflect, learn
Make mistakes to learn what works
Self reflection and keep learning
Celebrate success
Broaden your exposure – find a mentor, go to workshops

You asked for a 1 day Introduction to Facilitation

A one day course for emerging facilitators and leaders interested in broadening their people and meeting skills.  This intense and dynamic training is a fantastic way pick up out of the ordinary skills in effective facilitation and leadership so that you can be more engaging and bring about deeper change for the people you work with.

 

Who is it for?

The course is for people who have already started facilitating or leading groups of people and who are hungry to branch out and try more effective techniques and ideas from outside the box.  This course will expose you to dozens of new tactics and give you are chance to hone your skills in a fun and supportive setting.

Here’s what previous participants said:

 

“Amazing “

“Great modelling of facilitation – experience it before you try it”

“Very practical experiential learning – heaps of fun – gets you thinking outside the box”

“Come with an open mind – I’ve discovered for example, that I can be more creative than I thought and I can facilitate this for others too”

“Really great for a wide range of previous experiences from novice to experienced.  I learned so much and would definitely come back for a part II”

 

Learning Outcomes

  • Deepen your understanding of ideas behind facilitation and participatory leadership
  • Develop a bigger tool kit of practical techniques and skills and the strategies to collate them to make facilitation more effective
  • Experience dozens of common and uncommon facilitation techniques including:
    • Working in non-office settings to achieve more impact
    • Developing greater self-mastery in tricky or challenging situations
    • Dealing with controversial issues and divergent perspectives
    • Developing a wider repertoire non-verbal communication skills
  • Try out new techniques for themselves and receive feedback
  • Reflect on your own personal strengths and develop your own follow up action plan

 

Who runs it?

Your guide is Liana Stupples a facilitator with over 20 years international experience.  Liana has drawn from her diverse work co-ordinating everything from international human rights campaigns, community engagement for controversial resource management issues, national social innovation projects, youth going on outdoor adventures to community singing and distilled the most powerful and extraordinary facilitation techniques for you.

She has worked for all sectors including business, government and not for profit and understands the challenges of good leadership and facilitation in each.  She has trained an equally wide range of people from international diplomats, to woman in prison.

Liana somehow helps you feel relaxed and open to new experiences; she will stick beside you as you challenge yourself. She can find the playful side of most things and she commits to bringing an engaging energy as well as sensitive facilitation skills to every event she runs.  Despite the fun she is serious about building the capacity of people and organisations to tackle the real and the tough stuff. That is why she has been curious all her life about how to better facilitate and lead and wants you to practically benefit from this insight.

Liana developed the successful 2 day Extraordinary Facilitation Course

What you get:

  • Full day training in a fantastic venue
  • Full e-handbook of techniques and tips
  • Free follow up coaching session and peer support forum

[This course is designed to perfectly complement the Introduction to Extraordinary facilitation 1 day course]

Tauranga’s Historic Village

Date(s) – 25/03/2019
9:00 am – 4:00 pm

Cost: Extra-ordinary Facilitation (1 day) only $125, or

Extra-ordinary Facilitation and Visual Thinking (2 days)- $200

Register with SociaLink

 

Also coming up: 2 day course in Paekakariki Wellington  May 30 and 31 $550. Tickets are here

 

contact Liana.stupples@gmail.com to reserve your place

Learn visual tools for non-artists!

 

Extraordinary Visual Thinking

A one day introduction to the power of visual tools for life and work

Tauranga, Christchurch, Wellington

 

“If you want greater confidence to make and draw without having to be an artist, this is the course for you”

 

Visual thinking is a fast track to clearer thinking, deeper engagement, better recall and so much more.  This one day course is for people who want to get started on working visually and come away with powerful easy to master tools

Participants will come away with:

  • Knowledge about the benefits of visual thinking
  • Greater confidence to make and draw without having to be an artist
  • Top techniques to work with 8 key elements of visual work:
  • Objects and positions
  • Lines and dots
  • Scale
  • Text
  • Shade and colour
  • Themes and Templates
  • Icons (build your own library of 50 icons!)
  • Characters (top tips to draw Easy Peasy People in your own style)
  • Tips and a chance to try (or buy) the best tools
  • Ideas for how to apply your new skills;
    • Idea for participative visuals when working as a group
    • Ideas for Sketch notes for yourself to record and recall
    • Ideas to clearly communicate with and engage others
  • Create your own course book and take it home to continue your practice
  • Have access to a coach and the community of course participants to continue your learning

[This course is designed to perfectly complement the Introduction to Extraordinary facilitation 1 day course]

Liana’s Graphic facilitation is “awe inspiring” (Facilitation client)

“You know you get the notes from meetings and they go straight in the drawer, but I put that picture you did up on the wall for all my team to see” (Facilitation participant)

 

Your Guide

 

Liana Stupples is a creative facilitator who works with organisations and communities for sustainable outcomes.  She specialises in bringing together the worlds of outdoor adventure, singing, making and drawing to tough environmental and social issues.  When she was young she didn’t think she could draw, now she uses drawing and other visual techniques to help her clients clarify, communicate, create and collaborate.  Liana is a fun and engaging teacher and has developed this introductory course to be suitable for anyone who is curious about visual thinking.

Tauranga- discounted course:

This course is in Tauranga’s Historic Village on 26 March from 9-4

It is run in conjunction with the Introduction to Extraordinary Facilitation on 25th March

Cost: Extra-ordinary Visual Thinking (1 day) only $125, or

Introduction to Extra-ordinary Facilitation and Visual Thinking (2 days)- $200

Register with SociaLink

 

Tickets Wellington CBD 15  May here

 

 

Christchurch CBD 30 April here

 

 

Extraordinary Powers #1 – Radical survival through routine curiosity

EXTRAORDINARY POWERS #1

Radical Survival through routine curiosity

Know that feeling where you know a thing, but then some (other) thing comes along, and “woomph”, you are in a whole new depth of knowing that thing (the first thing)?

I think you call it an epiphany.

Let me tell you what I have just deeply re-realised about curiosity and asking great questions.

 

What I thought I knew about curiosity

I have always placed great stock in the power of the question. Striving to really listen and ask great questions is what I do in my work with groups and clients and try to pass on to others in my

Extraordinary Facilitation courses. As Einstein said:

 

“ If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper Question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes “

Albert Einstein

And curiosity is pretty much always one of the key values and behaviours that I encourage with groups. Because, if facilitation is about bringing about a change, then you need a powerful

tool to overcome all the uncertainty, fear, discomfort and cynicism that change can unearth.

It is often a good idea to hang out in

 

that slightly uncomfortable “In between” place where you don’t know the answer for a while:

 

“Because the best path out of the messiness is rarely the quick fix that first rushes to mind.”

Heather Plett

Sometimes you have to “live the question” to enable you to see what actually is, what is emerging of its own accord, or what creative opportunity there really is.  Sometimes as a facilitator you manage to embody and share the courage that the group needs.  Perhaps by:

  • Listening and being there – letting them know that you are not going to give up on them
  • Encouraging Curiosity

 

Here are some behaviours that I think help a group “do” curiosity:

Curiosity Behaviours

  • We maintain an open mind
  • We seek diverse and new information so we don’t get stale
  • We share information so our reasoning can be understood
  • We suspend judgments until we find out more
  • We play in the face of adversity (try out new things – even for fun!)

 

And in my Outdoor experiential work, paying attention and noticing is a core behaviour that leads to great connection with nature and yourself.

“It’s like you ask your body and the world around you – “what is really going on?” And you patiently wait for an answer.”

 

A story of a girl’s unconscious habit of paying attention to birds

But this week I read some thoughts from 8 shields, an organisation that promotes nature connection, and that’s when it all came together.  Matt tells a story:

“My daughter developed an impressive awareness of the birds in our neighborhood [sic] without trying to… [She had] no special interest in birds and she never carries binoculars… Despite this, over the past few years she has managed to find several rare birds that even dedicated birders might struggle to find…

I believe it’s partly due to the power of routine questions asked over time.

…[I’ve received] mentoring from Jon Young. One of the first things he did was challenge me to regularly listen for the quietest sound.”  It seemed natural to bring my daughter into this routine as well. “…Upon hearing something I would ask, What was that I just heard?  In the beginning she often hadn’t noticed the sound, so we would stand quietly for a moment to see if we could hear it again.”

But over time, …“I was regularly surprised at how much she noticed, even when it seemed like she wasn’t paying any attention at all.”…I don’t think she ever realized the significance, but “…a simple question asked routinely over months and years led my daughter to develop an unconscious habit of paying attention to birds.

She cannot really explain it, but I think the look and sound of our regular birds form a baseline she now recognizes at a subconscious level. When an unusual bird shows up, it stands out as different and draws her conscious attention.”

 

A routine question for Leaders

So, routine questions are obviously a powerful way to cultivate a deeper nature connection. But,

what if this power was applied to other area of your life – to your emotional intelligence, for example?

 

What if a boss developed a routine question: “What is the smallest voice in this workplace?”

What if a facilitator asked a question: “what is the least heard emotion in this gathering?”

Over time you could cultivate unconscious superpowers!

 

Nerd Alert: A story of a girl in re-imagined Africa after a future ice age

This way of learning reminded me of one of my favourite Books, Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dan.  Doris tells us the story of how Mara learns in a reimagined Africa after a future ice age. In the absence of formal schooling, a game is used in which children are asked repeatedly, “What did you see today?”  The child learns to observe and tell stories about her world.

This is the basis of her Mara developing the knowledge and skills she needs in her post-apocalyptic world.

This “pedagogy” has been written about by scholars and this game is compared to Henry James’s use of a child’s perspective in “What Maisie Knew”, to strategies for unveiling and “naming” the world in Paulo Freire’s ”Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, and to ideas about teaching in Idries Shah’s “The Sufis” and “Learning How to Learn”. (Lessing herself was brought up around Sufi thinking).

One article argues that radical and anticolonial approaches to learning are figured in Lessing’s fiction, and in her Nobel lecture, as essential for human survival.

The “woomph”

That was the “woomph!”. Cultivating curiosity is an act of radical survival!  It’s not just about noticing birds, or being a better facilitator.  It’s about a better humanity.

I hope you get this and go out and curiously experiment with the action of routine curiosity.

 

Aroha Nui

Extraordinary Facilitation Training May 2018

Join Us, Kapiti, May 2108

A Two day Bootcamp for emerging facilitators and leaders interested in mastering techniques from outside the ordinary: from Outdoor Adventure, Community Building, Creative Innovation, Ecopsychology and more.

This intense and dynamic training course is a fantastic way to develop extraordinary skills in effective facilitation and leadership so that you can be more engaging and bring about deeper change for the people you work with.

 

Who is it for?

The course is for people who have already started facilitating or leading groups of people and who are hungry to branch out and try more effective techniques and ideas from outside the box.  This course will expose you to dozens of new tactics and give you are chance to hone your skills in a fun and supportive setting.

Here’s what previous participants said:

“Amazing ”

“Great modelling of facilitation – experience it before you try it”

“Very practical experiential learning – heaps of fun – gets you thinking outside the box”

“Come with an open mind – I’ve discovered for example, that I can be more creative than I thought and I can facilitate this for others too”

“Really great for a wide range of previous experiences from novice to experienced.  I learned so much and would definitely come back for a part II”

 

Learning Outcomes

During this course, participants will:

  • Deepen their understanding of the ideas behind facilitation and participatory leadership
  • Develop a bigger tool kit of practical techniques and skills and the strategies to collate them to make facilitation more effective
  • Experience dozens of common and uncommon facilitation techniques including:
    • Working in non-office settings to achieve more impact
    • Honing skills in supporting innovation and creativity
    • Developing greater self-mastery in tricky or challenging situations
    • Dealing with controversial issues and divergent perspectives
    • Developing a wider repertoire non-verbal communication skills
  • Try out new techniques for themselves and receive feedback
  • Reflect on your own personal strengths and receive coaching to boost your unique and effective style
  • Develop your own follow up action plan

 

Who runs it?

Your guide is Liana Stupples a facilitator with over 20 years international experience.  Liana has drawn from her diverse work co-ordinating everything from international human rights campaigns, community engagement for controversial resource management issues, national social innovation projects, youth going on outdoor adventures to community singing and distilled the most powerful and extraordinary facilitation techniques for you.

She has worked for all sectors including business, government and not for profit and understands the challenges of good leadership and facilitation in each.  She has trained an equally wide range of people from international diplomats, to woman in prison.

Liana somehow helps you feel relaxed and open to new experiences; she will stick beside you as you challenge yourself. She can find the playful side of most things and she commits to bringing an engaging energy as well as sensitive facilitation skills to every event she runs.  Despite the fun she is serious about building the capacity of people and organisations to tackle the real and the tough stuff. That is why she has been curious all her life about how to better facilitate and lead and wants you to practically benefit from this insight.

For more information see about

“Liana has a knack for seeing the bigger picture. She asks the right questions, the meaningful questions, and the hard questions, and facilitates the journey for us to find the best answers. Her expertise helps groups to produce strategic direction and positive impact and consistently leaves everyone feeling accomplished and inspired.”

Client

 

What you get for your money

Two days training in a fantastic central venue including time outside

Fully catered lunch and refreshments

Full handbook of techniques and tips

Free follow up coaching session and peer support forum

Your Investment

Waged/for profit or government organisations $550

students/unwaged/not for profits $350

early bird discount $50 off if book by March 31st 2018

 

The Venue

We will be in the glorious seaside village of Paekakariki.

It is only 45 minutes from the centre of Wellington – or there are a wide range of accomodation options. for example:

stay in wellington and get the train
stay locally in the village hotel Finns
stay locally in the campground
stay locally in Air Bnb places with very nice people

Great ! How do I book?

Send an email to liana.stupples@gmail.com – or comment below with your email address. A 50% deposit will secure your place.