The What Goes Around Blog

Facilitation Jam – 2014

Are you free on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th June? If you are – you might like to read on. If you are not – then maybe enjoy this excellent Slideshare on social business by Paul Taylor instead? It’s very good.

Anyway – back to the 6th and 7th of June…

Would you like the opportunity to spend a couple of days experimenting and honing your facilitation skills? A few of us are having a co-created facilitation jam session on Friday 6th June and the morning of Saturday 7th June 2014.

So far, the following people have signed up: Martin Couzins, Sukh Pabial, Meg Peppin, Doug Shaw, Tash Stallard, and Kev Wyke. A few others are mulling it over, and we’d like to open up the chance for others to play too. Would you like to take part?

The event will be quite free flowing with no one person responsible for leading the day. Instead we invite you to take turns to prepare and run a session during the event and receive immediate feedback on your ideas from your colleagues. You may be looking to improve on some existing methods you use – you may want to try something completely new. However you choose to play, it’s up to you.

This is being run as a not for profit event, you only pay to cover costs. The event will take place in historic Greenwich, London and we want to make it residential so we have some social time together as well. The cost for the space we need to jam on both days, plus overnight accommodation and breakfast on Saturday morning is £160 plus VAT per person. We hope you can join us for a couple of days of useful, challenging fun.

If you are free and would like to take part, please get in touch with anyone who is going for more information on how to pay and play.

Meantime – here is a little video I made as I reflected on the last session we had, back in January 2013.

Mood Lighting

Mervyn Dinnen and I had a wander round the Sensing Spaces exhibition at The Royal Academy this week. The exhibition, which is as much if not more about the space you occupy and the mood that emerges from that occupation, rather than art you look at, feels a little outside the Royal Academy’s comfort zone. You are encouraged to move around the exhibition in any direction you please, so we started with an ascent to the ceiling via an enclosed series of ramps and spiral staircases.

On top of the platform we admired the ceiling close up, and (mostly) kept our hands off the historical architecture.

We moved round the exhibition drifting through various degrees of light and shade, standing on and touching different surfaces (no keep off signs this time), occupying different spaces.

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We continued our wander around and afterwards, stopped for a coffee (him) and a beer (me). As we spoke about the exhibition, Mervyn told me that one of the biggest impacts he observed while walking around, was how the mood of our conversation altered depending on the space we occupied. He was right. Earlier on, as we ascended to the ceiling we talked optimistically and enthusiastically in the bright open space. Our conversation became playful as we moved through a brightly coloured environment made of plastic straws. Here – you are given the option to play with the straws and integrate your work into a mass of colour. We drifted through darker spaces too, and just as the light dimmed so did the volume and tone of our conversation.

I enjoyed catching up with Mervyn, and the exhibition has caused me to think on about the spaces in which we work and play, and the extent to which their design can and does affect us. The exhibition runs until April 6th and if you find yourself in London with an hour or two to spare before then, it’s well worth a visit.

Direction of Travel

This is a painting for my loving, supportive, wise friend and wife, Carole. Her favourite colour is blue, and the image is intended to symbolise movement, a journey, hence the title – Direction of Travel.

The painting is 20cm x 38cm, acrylic on canvas. I painted this in several layers, over several days, trying to add light and shade and through the thickness of paint, a little depth too. I rarely use acrylic paint – and I really enjoyed making this so I will make more use of this medium in future.