Tag: facilitation

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.

In Prague

Work is work, regardless of where you’re doing it. Work is something you do, not somewhere you go.

I disagree. Sometimes the opportunity to do interesting and useful work combines with a chance to do that work in very interesting places. In the previous 18 months I’ve been fortunate to travel beyond London to Dublin, Sandusky, New York City, Manchester, Glasgow, Minneapolis, Newcastle, Chicago, Baton Rouge, and other great cities and places to work. I can imagine that for someone who is permanently on globe trotting mode, this stuff might get a bit boring, but not for me. I find it fascinating to work in different parts of the world, observing cultural and architectural similarities and differences.

Prague is now added to the list of great places I’ve worked, and this time I was fortunate to be there working with Meg Peppin. We spent an intense couple of days facilitating some fascinating conversations for our client, and we managed to squeeze in a couple of hours looking around the city too. Here’s a little bit of what we saw.

Life is all about mixed feelings. There are good days and bad days, I’m no different from anyone else in that respect. These last few days, they definitely go in the good day drawer.

We’re Jamming

The office is closed today. A group of us are meeting in Greenwich London for a Facilitation Jam. I am confident it will create lots of challenge and useful fun, and I look forward to sharing my experiences with you soon.

In the meantime (geddit…Greenwich…meantime, never mind), can you find a little time to try something different today? Have fun.