The facilitation activity I use most often is a spectrum exercise. I draw a horizontal line and label each end, either with opposite words (e.g. proactive/reactive) or happy/sad faces or yes/no. Then I invite participants to mark an X where they sit on that continuum on whatever issue we’re talking about. It makes visible two different things: does the group tilt toward one pole or the other (i.e. “If this line were a teeter totter, would it tilt to the right or left?”), and how consistent are participants in their views (i.e. how spread out or clustered are their Xs)? It takes three minutes and makes lots of good information visible. I love high leverage tools.
There are sharks
We took this picture last week in Cape Cod.
It’s a powerful oxymoron, don’t you think?
Green flag means, “Go ahead and swim.”
Shark flag means…well, you know what that means.
There had been two shark sightings within the previous 48 hours.
There are sharks. Go ahead and swim. Continue reading “There are sharks”
Temporarily Invisible Results
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
~Will Durant (paraphrasing Aristotle)
My husband and son are building a pizza oven in our backyard. It will take them all summer, but I’m told that soon we’ll be producing deliciousness in three-minute increments for our friends and neighbours. One step in the construction recently involved a lesson in precision rock splitting from a friend who’s a stone mason. Tap, tap, tap. Nothing. Tap, tap, tap. Nothing. Eventually…tap, tap…and the rock split right down the line he’d carefully marked.
Continue reading “Temporarily Invisible Results”Irrational Wisdom
Sometimes the best decision doesn’t make sense on paper.
If you’re not a basketball fan or Canadian, you may not have heard that Kawhi Leonard will not be returning to the Toronto Raptors next season because he’s going to play for the Los Angeles Clippers. Toronto fans were disappointed, but Kawhi is from southern California. As one fan said on Twitter, “Toronto offered Kawhi everything it possibly could have, and more than anywhere else did, except it can never be home. We can’t compete with that.” Continue reading “Irrational Wisdom”
Back Where You Started
The shared experience of collaborative planning is a significant outcome in itself. It can build a sense of team, increase depth of understanding, build common vocabulary, and give people a touchstone on which to call in the future when a group starts to drift.
But is that shared experience enough? Don’t we also need to produce something together through it? What happens if our shared experience is one of seemingly landing right back where we started?