Collection of meeting facilitation methods

Hi all!

We’re working on a booklet collecting essential meeting facilitation tools (highlighting some of the better-described facilitation techniques from the SessionLab public library of workshop activities).

I wanted to share the current draft with you and ask for some feedback. You can see the overview of methods we’re planning to include as well as how we went about categorising them.

Don’t hesitate to provide any feedback on either the structure, the design or the methods. Also, would you find such booklet useful? What would you like to see in it? Do you know any similar collection?
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1q8bssLAv_JdjQ_nBOGWkKLbbTw8t9Y8e

Thanks for any feedback/suggestion,
Robert

The layout looks very good, but I’m wondering: is it worth the effort? Why do I need a booklet when I can search the online library?

I guess, what I said in this post also applies to the booklet:

This one (available in English, French, and Spanish):

https://www.aidsalliance.org/resources/467-100-ways-to-energise-groups

Hi Christoph,

Thank you for taking a look at on it, and also for the detailed comment in the other thread about the usability of the library. I find your comments absolutely valid and it’s definitely something we want to improve in the future in the library, so I really appreciate that you pointed it out!

As for the PDF itself, in my experience there are a couple of reasons that make/made the effort worthy:

  • Creating such a thematic highlight of best methods in a certain category forces us for more focused review and improvement of the tools (and their description) we include in the PDF, which in turns improve the quality of the tools in the library. /Of course, this would be also possible without creating a PDF, but in the end it just turns out to be a great motivation to get started with more curating efforts :slight_smile:

  • There are some areas where I think content discovery is not that easy yet in the library, and similar method-selections can offer an alternative while we improve the functionality of the library.

By the way, if you are interested you can get the first published version of the meeting facilitation toolkit booklet here:

Then again, it’s not an eternally final version, so if you notice anything we can improve on it, I appreciate any feedback :slight_smile:

cheers,
Robert

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I like the format and we’ll share your booklet. Well done. We’re also putting some methods in a printable format to accompany our online courses, and figuring out which format to use is a real challenge. There are pros and cons to each one.

I think you already know about the big collections (game storming, retrospective games, liberating structures, conteneo, etc.).
The other one that I’m finding really useful and under-exposed is Ava Butler’s Mission Critical Meetings collection. She has all her methods on her website, but to Christoph’s question above, I much prefer working with the print copy.
There are also a number of techniques under development with the complexity facilitators—folks like Cognitive Edge and team—but these are harder to access. Might be worth keeping an eye on those in case they get wider adoption.

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I don’t want to sound pedantic (and off topic), but I thought I’d mention that it is possible to quote from several posts within the same post: just navigate to any post, select the part you want to quote and hit “quote”. It will be inserted in the post you are currently writing.

Quoting not only makes reading easier, it also entails that the author of the quoted post will be notified.