Find answers and stimulating commentary on these and other topics in September’s issue of FacilitateProceedings:

• Blended Facilitation (Have Your Cake and Eat It Too)
• Bridging Cultural Boundaries in Global Teams
• Engage Event Participants To Generate Bottom Line Results
• Can You Select A CEO By Telephone?
• Develop Your Team’s Cultural Literacy

We’ve gotten lots of great reviews from our latest white paper about the 8 design principles for creating interactive webinars that keep participants on the edge of their seats and away from their emails. Download it here: Designing Interactive Webinars.

An effective story is surprising, emotional but most importantly it must be credible. In organizations, stories are the texts, spoken or written, as well as visual (problem trees, mindmaps, asset maps, etc.) that usually involve a plot of different interconnected events, binding different characters together about a project, organization or community.

In his paper on Why some Leaders Inspire Action while Others are Mostly Forgettable (download here), Shawn Callahan of Annecdote.com shared four reasons on the importance of stories in organizations. Stories: (a) convey emotion effectively, and emotion plus a strong idea can be persuasive, we can feel and remember them and eventually, our emotions inspire us to take action; (b) are concrete and have the ability to transport us imaginatively to a place where we can visualise the events being recounted; (c)are memorable: we are up to 22 times more likely to remember a story than a set of disconnected facts (such as presentation dot-points); and (4) represent a pull strategy, unlike the push strategy used when we argue in a more traditional way. Stories engage the listener, pulling them into the story to participate in the conversation, rather than telling them what to think.

Professor Brian Sturm presents storytelling as a way of organizing information, conveying emotions, and building community. A model of storytelling as altered state of consciousness (the story trance) is presented that inlcudes 16 portals to altered states. Three stories are told to illustrate the theoretical model: Truth and Story; What happens when you really listen; and The stone cutter. Storytelling ethics and the need for trust and truth are discussed in this 45 minute video.

In a Pecha kucha way, Shawn showed us how stories can handle even highly complex and chaotic situations requiring leadership and development champions.

Isn’t it time that we start collecting, sharing and exchanging stories?

To do good in Webinars, Julia Young of Facilitate Proceeding dished out five great tips for those amongst us wanting to become better web presenters and facilitators. The original five included: (a) design your agenda with a distracted participant in mind, (b) give out slides in advance – review briefly and then start asking provocative questions, (c) skip the video – prepare for a good dialogue between a moderator and expert, (d) don’t compromise the interactive learning portion of your workshop, and (e) look for ways to engage your participants before and after. Get more on her site. She has just expanded the list with additional 15 more tips. We found two  that are worth noting, even if you are not an online presenter. These are: (a) think like a facilitator and not a speaker or presenter and (b) develop virtual platform skills. Continue reading. She has also invited visitors to join her webinars, perhaps a good way to usher you in to this opportunity for facilitators.

Can we now mount webinars on the web? The answer is a resounding yes. And perhaps even much sooner than you think. Gone are the days when we needed a well equipped studio, a lighting crew, sound engineers and Hollywood editors, and so on. Now, a laptop (most of them comes with cameras too), a free software, and a host site could do the trick. Will the learning and enablement take time? You can invest one to two months spread over a year depending on your spare time. Yes it is easier said than done. However, if you have the patience, talent, and motivation, here are three baby steps to get you started. Now! First, get to know streaming technology. This site is a good intro and visit others too. Second, download a free software, play a bit and learn to use it. Third, rehearse! Recall Julia’s tips. Now continue practicing doing your own webinars. This could be just another opportunity for online facilitators, waiting to be tapped.

Michael Wilkinson of Leadership Strategies, Inc. recommends seven key skill areas. These are the ability to: (a) establish and maintain a high energy level, (b) formulate effective starting questions that drives the group to respond, (c) accept and summarize responses, (d) record the gists of what were said, (e) effectively carry the group through the process, (f) can demonstrate how to stay neutral, and (g) design and roll-out customized processes unique to the event. You can read the full article here.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ellen Weber from Brain Business points to the five faces of effective facilitators. These are: (a) curiosity and openness, (b) blind to people’s diverse characters, (c) ability to set the atmosphere and maintain it, (d) encouraging and stimulating, and (e) well organized. More details on her article can be found here. Note that the links offer more explanations.

Finally, Julie Grass of Momentum Group offered these tips for fabulous facilitators: (a) Never underestimate the power of AHA, (b) understand the audience and tune in, (c) mix-up, (d) humour, laughter and creativity; and (e) plan ahead and synch with the group. She outline these in her paper called Some Facilitators are Great and Some are Horrid. How do you rate with the above competencies?
Photo courtesy of Wordle.net.

Petcha Kutcha (pronounced pet-chach-ka) is the Japanese word for “chatter”. It is a presentation format in which content can be easily, efficiently and informally shown, usually at a public event called for that purpose. In this format, the presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece; exactly for 6 minutes and 40 seconds. It forces one to be concise, creative and compelling. How do we do it?

Originally devised by Architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham who sought to give young designers a venue to meet, network, show their work and to attract people to their experimental event space. They devised a format that kept presentations very concise to stimulate and sustain audience attention and increase the number of presenters within the course of one night. A typical Pecha Kucha Night hosts eight to 14 presenters. This video shows how it works!

Now, there are Pecha Kucha nights in 80 cities in the world. In Munich, Brussels, Melbourne, San Francisco, Glasgow, Eindhoven, Jakarta and Manila.

Why not Pecha Kutcha in development? Why not Petcha Kucha in your next meeting? Can you use it in presenting your next project’s DMF to the beneficiaries? We like to hear your stories!

Together with professional facilitators, they will review the PPMS and DMF processes and practices, in front and back of the training stage. They will explore how they contribute to implementation performance, monitoring and evaluation. Then, they will discuss the features of facilitation, go though some concepts, tools and behavior, and finally simulate those processes thereby enhancing their facilitators competencies. Like the others, the course is packed with exercises and practice sessions.

Look at the process of creating vision. A vision is a response to what the situation is calling for? To a conductor, this means deciding whether to play Vivaldi or Mozart with a given 60 or 120 ensemble orchestra. This is not an easy one. The conductor needs to calculate what the ensemble can do and match that with what would make the audience respond. Ecstatically, if possible! Once done, the conductor should effectively transfer this vision to the ensemble.

A series of rehearsals would allow for an implicit contract between the conductor and the orchestra to evolve. Both discover that when interesting ideas derived via participative dialogues blends with powerful music create an extremely strong emotional learning experience.

This joint experience eventually leads to the element of trust. Conductors also rely on trust. Trust is a vital part of their ability to lead. The musicians trust the conductor to lead them to a successful completion of the piece. Without a leader there is no trust, with no trust performance falters. Trust is transformed into passion as the ownership of the ideas on how to improve performance deepens.

Consider this video as an orchestration case study. This short clip can show us valuable lessons in what to do and what not to do in leading and orchestrating large scale change via effective project management. What can facilitators learn from this case?

It is a composite audio/video of song whereby additional tracks were laid in by different singers and musicians from different places around the world. The finished product is tremendous! The song itself is that classic standard “Stand By Me” released in 1955 by The Staple Singers and released again in 1961 by the Drifters. This composite version is a real toe tapper.

Interestingly, “stand by me” could be a song by a project manager to solicit more commitment, ownership and teamwork. I will try and show it at the end of every project development workshop that I will conduct. Lots of hhhuuggssss

Ed Canela

Click to watch….