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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, rather than treat it as an end in itself.

Maha Bali’s explanations and exemplifications of Intentionally Equitable Hospitality will go a long way to helping you make equity a part of your work. IEH is a deliberate approach to facilitation that prioritises structural and environmental design to create accessible, sensitive, and inclusive spaces.

It was eye-opening and joyful to speak with Maha. 

Find out about:

• What Intentionally Equitable Hospitality is and how it relates to our work
• What the four phases of Intentionally Equitable Hospitality are
• Why focusing on micro imbalances can shift the macro
• Creating socially just education, information, and community spaces
• How to plan, prepare, and resource more equitable workshops
• How to use technology to bring an IEH approach to hybrid conferences and workshops

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Links

Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.

Reflecting Allowed, Maha’s blog about education.

MyFest website.

Equity Unbound.

Community Building Resources.

Virtually Connecting website and YouTube.

Connect to Maha:

On LinkedIn

On Twitter

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

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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 fascinating and sometimes mundane, sometimes enlightening and sometimes misguided. I took every answer as it arrived, not asking follow-up questions and not editing the information it gave me.

What is most interesting is to see what the collected knowledge it’s been trained on can tell us about the current state of and view on facilitation.

Find out about:

• Differentiating the skills needed and demands of online, in-person, and hybrid facilitation
• Why AI cannot replace a human facilitator
• ChatGPT's reply on whether facilitation is the 21st century's most crucial leadership skill
• How to learn facilitation and what distinguishes a good from a great facilitator
• The facilitators' biggest challenge and how to overcome it
• What the future of facilitation looks like — and how we might include AI in it

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Support the show

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

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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 fun.

He’s had more than a little success with his approach and is kind enough to share some of the most impactful learnings so far in this episode. It’s unmissable for anyone interested in new ways of learning, positive motivation, and self-directed growth.

Find out about:

• Getting granular about what makes a game a game
• Understanding and using gameplay loops to make stickier activities
• Why games are the ultimate sandbox for behavioural change
• How to avoid the death knell of being labelled as ‘forced fun’
• Why games are so effective at getting us into a flow state
• Why Viren recommends facilitators come from within an organisation
• How to strike a balance between purposeful fun and distraction

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Links

Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.

Viren’s simple, effective, and free In the Game scorecard

Connect to Viren:

On LinkedIn

Support the show

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

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 fun.

He’s had more than a little success with his approach and is kind enough to share some of the most impactful learnings so far in this episode. It’s unmissable for anyone interested in new ways of learning, positive motivation, and self-directed growth.

Find out about:

• Getting granular about what makes a game a game
• Understanding and using gameplay loops to make stickier activities
• Why games are the ultimate sandbox for behavioural change
• How to avoid the death knell of being labelled as ‘forced fun’
• Why games are so effective at getting us into a flow state
• Why Viren recommends facilitators come from within an organisation
• How to strike a balance between purposeful fun and distraction

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

And download the free 1-page summary, so you can always have the key points of this episode to hand.

Links

Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.

Viren’s simple, effective, and free In the Game scorecard

Connect to Viren:

On LinkedIn

Support the Show.

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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 service businesses are notoriously difficult to price. And, as the founder of Untapped Pricing—a highly regarded pricing strategy consultancy—her advice is certainly of the highest value.

Enjoy a free taster of her expertise in this episode!

Find out about:

• Strategies for pricing coaching and facilitation services
• The relationship between pricing, and positioning and how to get confident with both
• Jenny’s three rules for discounting and how to discount without devaluing yourself
• What communication has to do with pricing and why it can make or break your choice
• The three facets to consider to determine what your services are ‘worth’
• How tiered, rather than bespoke or binary, pricing makes life easier for you and your prospects

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Links

Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.

Bitesize pricing tactics - a collection of 2min videos.

Downloadable PDF guides - to take you through the fundamentals of pricing strategy that works for your customers and for you.

Untapped’s Pricing Scorecard - our free tool to evaluate the health of your pricing in minutes. Learn how to improve it with a personalised 22-page report.

Connect to Jenny:

On LinkedIn

Book a call with Jenny

Support the show

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

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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-neutral learning through play, a way to tap into ourselves when we can’t rely on language, and a means of overcoming the challenges that refuse to budge.

Learn all about Things, Jules’ story, and how a bit more visual thinking can make your workshops work even better. 

Find out about:

• What Jules’ Things are and why they can be so magical in workshop settings
• How the four principles of Collect, Connect, Capture and Communicate appear in Thinking with Things
• Why participants behaving like children is not such a bad situation
• How to get out of your head and improve your hosting by focusing on engaged participants
• How to turn a disparate pile of found objects into a problem-solving powerhouse
• Why Jules prioritises a remarkable ending to her workshops

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Links

Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.

Think With Things website

Connect to Jules:

On LinkedIn

On Instagram

On Facebook

Support the show

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

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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—about the podcast, what I’ve learned, and my thoughts on facilitation at large.

Michelle Howard, previous guest on the show, asked the questions on your behalf.  

Find out about:

• My own misconceptions about facilitation that the podcast has revealed over time
• What I would say, if I could travel back in time, to the Myriam who was about to record episode one
• Why I’m always, at least partly, pursuing constructive ignorance in my interviews
• How my focus has shifted from what my guests ‘do’ and where it rests now
• What has changed in my professional facilitate practice since hosting the show
• Lessons and points of interest from building the NDB community

Big thanks to Patrick Cowden, Yvonne Chin Irving,  Lily Gros, Mirjam Leunissen, Vitalij Malahov, Zoha Sharifyazdi and Dov Tsal for contributing questions!

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Connect to Myriam:

On LinkedIn

Support the show

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

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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 creativity killer.”

But, as (online) facilitators, we have first-hand experience with remote teams’ creativity and effective collaboration. But, we haven’t had hard evidence proving the study wrong.

My guests on today’s bonus episode, Elise Keith (CEO of Lucid Meetings, Author and Meeting Innovator) and Dave Mastronardi (CEO of the Gamestorming Group) have the ambition to test the hypothesis that online work killed creativity through a global mega experiment. As they kick off the project with a Symposium, Elise and Dave joined me to share their vision, drivers and open questions.

Listen to this episode to find out about:

• The definition of creativity and how to measure it
• How the project came to be
• The bigger vision behind the project: How online collaboration can tackle global challenges
• How you can get involved in the experiment

Don't miss the New Rules for Work Experiment and Symposium
Visit the New Rules for Work Website

And, don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Links

Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.

Read the Article published in ‘Nature’

Read about the study

Watch the Youtube video: Why video calls are bad for brainstorming

Connect to Elise and Dave:

Connect to Elise on LinkedIn

Connect to Dave on LinkedIn

Support the show

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

Send us a text

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 as how we interpreted the issues and questions that Rod and Nikesh started with.

Implementing facilitation skills at scale can be a daunting thought, but it’s eminently more enticing when it’s achieved through a generative, self-sustaining cycle of talent training talent!

Find out about:

• What the structure and process of the academy is and how it works
• How to look at a problem with a broad view, to find unexpected solutions
• The unique challenges of internal facilitation vs. external facilitation
• The unexpected benefits of implementing a facilitation mindset across an organisation
• Why an interdepartmental-by-default approach creates more meaningful space for change
• How framing facilitation as problem-solving generated more interest
• How to create a virtuous cycle of facilitation, training, and learning

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

Connect to Rod and Nikesh:

Rod on LinkedIn

Nikesh on LinkedIn

Support the show

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You can now find the podcast on Substack, where your host Dr. Myriam Hadnes is building a club for you to find fellow listeners and peers: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/