The Facilitation Week took place on a worldwide scale from the 19th to the 25th of October. Organized by the IAF, this event was the ideal opportunity to promote all aspects of facilitation, increase awareness on the matter and enable us, professionals of the field, to interact on our best practices. As it was simply unthinkable for Stormz to let this opportunity pass by, we organized an online workshop specifically for the event to answer the following question: “If you had a magic wand, what would you do to help facilitators from all around the world?”
Underneath the off-the-wall tone of this question lies a very serious issue, considering that facilitation, even though it is being increasingly used in informed business circles, remains partially unknown to a wider audience. Formalized at the end of the 80’s, facilitation will help, in the next few years – and that is our strongest belief – to revolutionize our ways of working through collaboration techniques (no more unproductive meetings or useless e-mails!)
A #happy #collaboration week
It is with such an ambition that we have invited a whole network of partners and facilitators from all over the world to join us to discuss on the ways to expand the use of facilitation techniques and methodology. An event which was closely monitored on Twitter with the hashtags #StormzWOW and #FacWeek.
In addition to our Stormz team, 20 participants from Canada, the United States, England, Italy, Sweden and, of course, France, have joined the event. A total of 30 suggestions, split into 4 clusters (Education and Training, Corporate world, Tools and techniques, Mindset) were assessed, to which we should add 31 idea improvements, more than 50 comments and 8 attached documents for this 3-step workshop – everything in English.
In one-week time, the workshop has been constantly improved and enriched in a collaborative way. While some participants were adding pictures to other people’s suggestions, others were commenting, debating, thinking about how to make great ideas happen in real life or discussing the key drivers of success. A beautiful collaboration experience!
Education, the key to success.
After an assessment which relied on 3 criterias (Efficiency, Feasibility, Envy), two main ideas have emerged, both of which focused on how critical it is to get accustomed to facilitation in educational contexts – at university, of course, but also before that!
Here are other ideas from the other categories which have gained momentum:
- Facilitation in the companies: Transform the traditional meetings into a real time of sharing, surprise, fun and concretization.
- Tools and techniques: Develop the use more graphic facilitation to illustrate steps of particular techniques.
- Mindset: "Facilitation Magazine" - 1.000.000 subscribers all around the world! With a "Facilitator of the month" and every month new faciliation techniques and workshop ideas.
Beyond simply having a structured deliverable which has been collectively enriched by facilitation experts from all around the world, this workshop helped raise awareness on this topic! Facilitation should not only be used by consulting professionals or limited to the animation of brainstorming workshops with sticky notes and old-fashioned paperboards. It is now urgent to make it spread to all professional fields and to all our learning methodologies.
If you would like to commit to one of these missions in a more active way, please contact us to talk about it!