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Creative facilitation

cfFacilitation is one of those odd skills, or activities, where it is very hard to define, but you tend to know when it is being done well, or indeed badly.

Viv McWaters and Johnnie Moore are two people who can definitely be described as great facilitators, and they have collected together their combined thinking and experience on the topic into a free e-book, Creative Facilitation.

Here’s a quick synopsis of each section of the book, from their website:

Part One: Why Facilitation?

We explore the impact of facilitation and facilitators on groups, the qualities that make for good facilitators and some of the underlying philosophy that underpins our approach.

Part Two: Workshop Basics

The foundations of facilitating workshops.

Part Three: Beyond the Basics

…is about providing an understanding of how to engage people and use different approaches.

Part Four: Creative Facilitation

…explores some of the knowledge and understanding that helps facilitators step into complex, and sometimes difficult, situations.

Part Five: Resources

…provides suggestions for developing your own “toolkit” with what you learn from experience as well as useful links, resources and other information.

To get Creative Facilitation for free, you just have to sign up to their email newsletter. It’s a great resource, and given that the emails tend to be very useful as well, it’s a bit of a win-win.

Simplifying complex work

Yves Morieux gives a really interesting TED talk here on how to reduce the complexity of modern day work.

He has six rules to help make this happen:

  1. Understand what your colleagues actually do.
  2. Remove rules: Reinforce the “integrators” Integrators are managers. Give them more power and interest to make others cooperate. Remove the layers so they can be closer to the action. Stop making more rules that reduce the discretionary power to managers.
  3. Increase the quantity of power so you can empower everybody to use their judgment and their intelligence. Move away from insulation and give more people the opportunity to take risks.
  4. Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions
  5. Increase reciprocity by removing buffers that make individual employees self-sufficient.
  6. Reward those who cooperate and blame those who don’t cooperate. The CEO of The Lego Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, has a great way to use it. He says, blame is not for failure; it is for failing to help or ask for help.

Kahootz’s guide to a digital first culture

kahootzlogoKahootz is a cloud based project collaboration platform, which looks pretty good – and their blog is full of useful stuff.

Recently their CEO John Glover posted about “Creating a ‘Digital First’ culture in your public sector organisation“. In it he mentions four main points, which are well worth reflecting on.

1. Involve staff at the outset

While there are organisational purposes for going digital first, it’s staff who will make the change happen, so you need them to be onside.

2. Don’t assume management understand digital

Having management buy in is vital – but you need to make sure that it is at a deep level that demonstrates true understanding of the full potential of technology to transform working culture.

3. Start small – and give staff freedom to innovate

Taking an agile approach to implement a digital first strategy is most likely to succeed. Let staff try stuff out and see what works for them, rather than procuring a gigantic platform that you’ve no real idea will take off or not.

4. Be clear about what you want to achieve

You need to know why your doing what you’re doing. Unless you have specific objectives, how will you know if you are succeeding? Everyone needs to be pulling in the same direction, and to make that happen you need a shared vision across the organisation.

Some great advice there – would you add anything?

Do you produce documents, or do you do work?

I really rather like this video interview with Rod Drury, CEO of the cloud accounting company Xero. I’ve been a happy Xero customer for a few years now – the system makes accounting comprehensible to the non-accountant, which is great!

In the interview, Rod talks about Xero’s switch from traditional Microsoft based systems to using Google’s offering, with all the social and collaborative stuff that entails. He describes how the availability of truly collaborative technology has helped to drive a culture change at Xero, around nimbleness and flexibility.

In one great line, Rod asks “do you produce documents, or do you do work?” – a question we’ve probably all asked ourselves at some point in our working lives.

Watch the interview below – or here’s a link – it’s well worth it.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-Vf9nA4YOQ]

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