Dr. Mo Khan is my guest on this special edition podcast on innovation culture and opportunities in challenging times.

Mo is the founder of Enhance Innovation and author of the e-book, The Innovator's Treasure Chest, which you can download for free here.

Mo has had a fantastic career and worked internationally with world-class engineering businesses. We discuss how important innovation is in challenging times, how some businesses don't give their employees the scope and space to innovate, and how collaboration fuels innovation.

If you'd like to find out more and sign up for the free Creative Reset programme for small  to medium-sized businesses that I talk about in the podcast, just click here.

You can see Mo in action on his YouTube Channel

Connect with him at:

Linkedin

Instagram

Twitter

Listen in for my productivity hacks that I have put together specifically for workshop facilitators. 

Save time and energy, so that you can spend the time doing what you do best. Being creative, engaging and facilitating your delegates and getting your target results and impacts from your workshops.

If you'd like to go one step further, you'll also love my free playbook download, Productivity for Innovators, available here. Just scroll down to the Personal Development section at the bottom of the page and you'll find it there.

Join me and Georgia Duffee from Benedetto in this special podcast episode to help with planning and strategising in these exceptionally challenging times. 

The episode was recorded at lunchtime on Friday 20th March 2020.

Georgia has participated as a delegate in both my paid and free programmes for business leaders, including one that I'm running right now - Creative Reset -  to support business owners to navigate through these unprecedented times. If you'd like to join my free Creative Reset programme, you'll find more details here.

Georgia is also a member of my free Facebook group - Idea Time for Workshop Facilitators - which she mentions in the podcast. If you'd like to join, here's the link.

She also talks about my free Resilience playbook, which you can download here.

In this episode, Georgia shares the tools and techniques that she has used to shape her business plan for dealing with the current coronavirus situation, plus how she has successfully launched and sold out three online programmes for her different target customer segments.

Georgia would love to hear from you.

To find out all about Georgia's services and programmes, here are the links:

Benedetto Accounts & Tax Website

LinkedIn

Facebook

Instagram

Let me know what you think of the podcast - I'd love to hear from you!

In this solo episode I share my thoughts, experiences and tips on how to maintain a resilient, focused and healthy mindset when navigating your business through what is a period of change and uncertainty.

I explore the theme of resilience and why it's important, and show how we can use the change curve to manage our own wellbeing and business decision-making to get better outcomes.

If you'd like to find our more about and join my free Creative Reset programme, you can see all the info and sign up here.

You can also download my free Resilience Playbook from the resources section in my Content Library.

In this special edition podcast with Mahmood Reza, the Numbers Rockstar, Mahmood shares advice on what small businesses can do to navigate these exceptional, challenging times.

He's an accounting and finance specialist and has also created a special blog focused on Covid-19 and cashflow here.

Mahmood gives a step-by-step guide for entrepreneurs who want to do a cashflow forecast for the next 3-4 months, reduce spending where possible without negatively impacting the business and create a plan. He gives an update on the support available for Government, correct at the time of recording at 7.30am UK time on Friday 20th March 2020.

We discuss the importance of creating a business plan - and you can access my own free programme and resources, Creative Reset for 2020, here. You can also download my free Business Plan playbook in my Content Studio here.

Mahmood and I move on to developing and growing an online business and the importance of consistent investment in effort and money in promotion.

Creating a course or an online offer is pretty straightforward, the challenge is to grow an audience and sell it. Planning of an online product or service is really important, and Mahmood recommends creating a separate business plan for it to make sure that it generates profit. 

Mahmood would love to hear from you. You can contact him here:

Free resources

Instagram

Facebook

Linkedin

Website

Welcome to this episode on Appreciative Inquiry for Facilitators.

In this podcast I explain what Appreciative Inquiry is, how it is a strengths-based approach, and how it can be useful for facilitators.

I share an Appreciative Inquiry facilitation process and a variety of tools, techniques and activities that you can use in your own facilitation.

If you'd like to download the free toolkit, go to the Content Studio on my website here, scroll down to Facilitation Toolkits and you will find it there.

To find out more about the academic theory on Appreciative Inquiry, look up the work of David Cooperrider here.

In this podcast, How to Facilitate Workshops with Broken Teams, I explore dysfunction in teams and why teams might be broken, and move on to the theme of trust. I then share a suggested agenda with you that you can use and adapt and tweak if you are planning to facilitate a session with a team that is not connecting.

For those of you who haven’t met me, I am Jo North and I love facilitating, and I facilitate thousands of people every year, I facilitate all over the world, and I also help facilitators to learn how to facilitate as well. I run the Idea Time Academy, which is a membership site full of training and resources to help facilitators expand their creativity confidence, and skills in facilitating, and expand their impact as well.

You can also access some free, great resources to accompany the podcast here:

• My 60 second video on Trust at Work

Plus, here's more info on the Lencioni model I mention.

I hope you enjoy the episode and find it useful - let me know what you think.

The theme for this episode is How to Facilitate Business Growth Workshops.

I take you through how you to design and facilitate a full business growth workshop that takes you from looking at changes and trends in the outside world through to looking internally at the business, and thinking about its strengths, the aspirations, the capabilities.

These are my favourite business growth activities. I run business growth events, strategy and business planning events a lot, with all sorts of different organisations. These facilitation tools and techniques work with all sorts of business, large and small, and in any industry sector. They are tried and tested.

For more free business growth resources and activities, head over to my Content Studio at https://bigbangpartnership.co.uk/resources/.

Hope you enjoy the episode and find it useful - let me know what you think.

The focus of my podcast here is on how to facilitate business improvement events. Business improvement is about efficiency, effectiveness, it is about the business operating as well as it possibly can.

That means with no waste, no duplication, no quality issues. It is all running really smoothly. There are some deep techniques on business improvement, such as Lean and Six Sigma. I am not going to go into depth on those techniques, although what I am going to share with you today is consistent with those, and is in many ways inspired by them. 

I am going to give you is a step by step process, so that if you need to, or want to run a process improvement event for your business, or even if you want to look at process improvement and business improvement in your own business, then you have got some tools and techniques to do that with. I have also provided you with a free  called Business Improvement Playbook. Download it here.

Business improvement can be incredibly powerful. I remember doing a business improvement event for a specialist electronics manufacturer, and they had never actually mapped out the process before, from a customer sending in an enquiry, and them receiving it through to the goods being dispatched from the warehouse. When we mapped it out, it was taking them three months to get from enquiry through to dispatch of the order. With some revisiting of what was going on we were able to get that down to between 6 & 8 weeks depending on the product. It was a very specialist and technical product, so that might sound a long time, but they saved 4 to 6 weeks on every product. You can imagine the difference that makes to customer satisfaction, because the customer is getting the products quicker, and also the efficiency and the cost, in terms of production, so profitability is better. They are also able to grow more because they can get more manufacturing done through the line. This doesn’t apply just to manufacturing. You can do this with any sort of business in any sort of process - whether you're a solopreneur consultant or a massive, global business.

One of the members of my Idea Time for Workshop Facilitators Facebook Group asked me for some ideas for creative facilitation activities to use when you're facilitating groups to establish their vision, mission and values.

Vision, mission and values really help connect people. They support a shared sense of purpose and direction and are important ingredients for collaborative team working and performance at organisation, team and project level.

In this solo podcast, which was originally a Facebook live broadcast, I explain what vision, mission and values are and why they are important, and share some techniques that you can use with teams when you're facilitating these sessions.

• A vision is aspirational. It’s a statement of where the business, team or person wants to be in the future. A great vision looks ahead, is purposefully ambitious and realistically stretchy.

• The mission of a team or a business is the core purpose. It’s why that team or business actually exists, the very reason a team or business has been set up. The mission really defines the ‘why?’ behind what what the organisation does, and its reasons for doing it.

• The values are the important principles, important beliefs, ways of behaving and seeing the world that connect everyone. They represent how the business does business.

The podcast is packed with creative facilitation suggestions so that your session is interactive, engaging and generates the input and ideas of the whole team.

If you'd like to read more about this, you can see my blog on how to run this sort of session here.