Unprofessionalism

Emotions are messy — they’re big, powerful, and changeable. Facts and data are much more palatable — they’re truths and we can discuss our use of them. But if an organisation is so focused on cognitive culture, they end up neglecting emotional culture. And that’s a sure path towards burnout, resentment, and employee turnover. Cognitive culture is easy to default to, so how can organisations get co...

What makes some events better than others? Is it the host, the setting, the purpose, or something else? Jacques Martiquet is The Party Scientist — he’s experimented, tested, and explored the science of gathering and connecting for 10+ years — and he’s got some fantastic answers. Jacques has committed himself to the mission of spreading the health benefits of human connection. Creating more impactf...

Self-Determination Theory posits that human motivation is driven by three central values: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. If we take SDT and apply it as a framework to facilitation, the parallels become apparent and abundant. Ib Ravn sees the opportunities here with great clarity and, as a result, has a lot of valuable insight to share about how we might use SDT in facilitation. In the cont...

It’s never been more important to facilitate with an awareness of power dynamics, systemic imbalances, and inequity within groups. The progress we’ve made—collectively—towards awareness and understanding of inequalities has been enormous, but the next big step is to do deliberate work to counter it. We’ve got all the awareness we could dream of and the time has come for us to act on that knowledge...

It’s the talk of the internet and business circles, the culmination of many years of research and training, and an amazing step forward into the next stage of technology enabled and enhanced life. ChatGPT, I’m amazed and amused to say, is this week’s guest. I put a series of questions, taken directly and adapted from previous episodes, to the conversational AI. What emerged was sometimes fascinati...

Nothing happens between childhood and adulthood that means we can no longer learn and grow through play, but for some reason we stop using this powerful tool once we get serious and put on blazers and heels. Viren Thakrar is leading the charge to change this for good, bringing games and fun into team development settings to help participants connect, collaborate, and have some good old fashioned f...

Does pricing make you prickle with anxiety? Imagine what it would be like to feel confident and calm about valuing your services… and now meet Jenny Millar, who can make that imagination a reality. Learn all about positioning, discounting, strategy, and communication in the context of pricing in this standout episode Jenny’s expertise in pricing will be invaluable to any facilitator or coach, as s...

Things—found objects, ephemera from the discarded world, are everywhere. A marble, a spoon, a coil of string. They’re forgettable and ignorable and they’re the magic ingredient that makes Jules Gilleland’s workshops work. Jules developed Things as a problem-solving tool, informed by design thinking, to help people connect the dots and capture their problems in a physical form. It’s a context-neutr...

The latest milestone for the workshops work podcast—200 episodes! 200! To celebrate the occasion, I’ve produced a special episode. Instead of speaking to a guest, I spoke to you. And what better way to source my inspiration for episode 200 than to turn to the community that has grown and flourished around the show? I turned to my community to gather their questions—big and small, serious and silly...

In May 2022, an academic research paper titled “Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation” was published in Nature (one of the most prestigious scientific publishers). They tested how the transition from in-person to online interaction affected innovation (measured by collective idea generation) and concluded that video calls were bad for brainstorming. The media derived: “Zoom is a cre...

How do you create a culture of independent and empowered facilitation in a large business? Well, Rod Butcher and Nikesh Patel of Fidelity International posed me that question and, together, we came up with a radical solution. This episode explains the story of how we built Fidelity International’s Facilitation Academy. You can hear about the process we followed and the results we’ve seen, as well...

“Keep it simple, stupid” is a popular refrain which might be better translated as “make it harder, stupid”! One of the most common misunderstandings Gabor Bittera encounters in his mission towards simplicity is the belief that simple = easy. Far from it, in fact. Sometimes, creating simplicity is the hardest task in a workshop. Thankfully, Gabor has done the hard miles and has advice that can save...

In an on-site workshops, breakout groups are a tried and tested way to get the group thinking, communicating, and developing. In online workshops, breakout rooms are a different beast. You press a button and the group disappears — you don’t know what they’re saying, whether they’re collaborating, or anything about their time together! Gwyn Wansbrough is on a mission to take the uncertainty out of...

Facilitation is a system that gives groups space to make sense — it’s not about guiding them towards something, nor is it about leading them. But what is ‘deliberate sensemaking’ all about? To the uninitiated, it may sound a little simplistic — is it just about helping people understand stuff that they’re working on? Michael Hamman, one of the foremost voices in Agile coaching and training, explai...

Meg Bolger is one of a few returning guests to this show, originally featured in episode 133 (’The conversation I wish I heard when I started facilitating’). Our conversation this time was a far cry from discussing what we wished we’d heard at the start of our careers. Instead, we focused on Meg’s area of expertise after 12+ years of development and practice: facilitating diversity, equity, and in...

When you’re facilitating, where are you? In your head, your body, a role? There are no wrong answers, but there are plenty of interesting questions you can ask to better understand how you facilitate. Anna Momber-Heers can share a lot of interesting insights, as her background is as a performance and communication coach. She helps professionals use tools and ideas from acting to get into their bod...

How often do you walk away from a conversation feeling heard, like you put across the things you wanted to? Feeling relaxed, not frantic? And how often do you workshops produce those same sensations? If it’s less often than you’d like, Johnnie Moore can help, with his Unhurried model for conversation (and more). As facilitators, we can learn a lot — directly and indirectly — from this approach. Un...

Language is messy. It comes with assumptions, uncertainties, and contradictions — but what else can we use to facilitate? Florentine Versteeg would never claim to have all the answer, but she is certainly asking all the right questions. Her thoughts on facilitation and the inherent privileges in our language take us on a fascinating journey in this episode. We challenge our ideas about communicati...

As facilitation has grown in popularity and awareness over the last decade. And, as markets grow, dilution and variance begins to naturally occur. Marcus Crow has been pondering this issue for a while — chewing over formalization, authentication, and accreditation in our profession. An idea he wanted to explore more (and what better stage than this podcast?) is what a degree in facilitation might...

Facilitation might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of courage — we do not charge valiantly into battle or wrestle wild animals! — but the closer one looks at it, the more the connection becomes visible. It takes courage to bring a group of people together and challenge them to grow and make progress. It takes courage to stand up and say “I will do this”. It takes courage t...

Facilitation might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of courage — we do not charge valiantly into battle or wrestle wild animals! — but the closer one looks at it, the more the connection becomes visible. It takes courage to bring a group of people together and challenge them to grow and make progress. It takes courage to stand up and say “I will do this”. It takes courage t...

Improvisation seems to have an inescapable connection with facilitation. It’s a topic we’ve touched on many times in this podcast but, to really dig into its depths, it made sense to speak with the man who — quite literally — wrote the book on it! Robert Poynton is the multi-talented author of Do Improvise and Do Pause, creator of Yellow (a unique online learning programme), and the fabled On Your...

Accessibility — ensuring the spaces we create are open, welcoming, and easy for everyone to join — is a critical, but often neglected, issue in facilitation. It took the rise of online workshops to take accessibility from an afterthought to a main event. But this increased focus on accessibility, long overdue as it was, has proven to be to everyone’s benefit. A rising tide lifts all boats and more...

Some of you who listen to this episode will not have been alive for 30 years, which gives Barb Pedersen the wonderful claim that she’s been facilitating since before you were born! Not that she would boast in such a way; Barb’s approach is informed by humility, curiosity, and positivity (as you will quickly come to learn in this episode). Those tenets have served her brilliantly in her three decad...

Some episodes of this podcast have an extremely tight focus — a specific topic, inspected under scrutiny. Some episodes are like walks through a beautiful park, stopping and admiring different beautiful moments and places. My conversation with Francis Laleman — a trainer-of-trainers, a facilitation teacher, and an excellent facilitator in his own right — was most certainly one in the latter catego...