Entries by Gillian

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Swimming in the Sea of Learning Resources

I am currently working with a team focusing on biodiversity conservation and assessment to “makeover” an existing training curriculum into one even more interactive and learner-focused. As a part of this process I offered to put together a selected list of resources, from the raft of those available, that are particularly useful to me in this kind of work. As […]

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Working with Systems Archetypes in Learning Contexts

Systems Thinking Learning: Stand Alone or Integrated? This year I have been working with LEAD Europe (Leadership for Environment and Development) to integrate systems thinking effectively into the leadership curriculum. Last year, I contributed a stand alone module to the LEAD Training (Using Systems Thinking: How to Go from 140 PowerPoint Slides to 2), and think that this […]

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TEDx Change Geneva: The Future We Make

I was very honoured tonight to be able to speak after Melinda French Gates, Graca Machel, Hans Rosling, and Mechai Viravaidya at the TEDxChange event, hosted by the Gates Foundation. Well, this is technically true, although I was speaking on the TEDxGeneva local stage, which followed directly after the simulcast of the New York event. Lizzie, representing tonight the Hub in […]

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Live from the Balaton Group Meeting in Iceland

We started our annual Balaton Group Meeting this morning (held this year in spectacular Selfoss, Iceland). Our topic this year is “Food Futures” and we have already heard several speakers on the topic, including Karan Khosla (Earthsafe in India) who presented a systems model aimed at conceptualising the issues. John Ingram from the Environmental Change Institute (Oxford) shared with us […]

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Horses for Courses: Facilitating High Stake Workshops

There are so many kinds of workshops/meetings/events, with as many different kinds of objectives and outcomes desired. Each needs a specific structure and build to get successfully from start to finish. For veteran facilitators this might be a statement of the blindingly obvious. However, we do have our favorite sequences. We have tried and tested frames for group work, our […]

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New Systems Thinking Game: The Flash Mob Game

I just finished co-facilitating a week-long leadership training course with LEAD’s Edward Kellow. Systems Thinking was one of the cross-cutting skills components, which started with an introduction on Day 1 (introduction and drawing Behaviour Over Time Graphs), and then on Day 2 we got into reading and drawing Causal Loop Diagrams. Both were entirely based […]

Did You Know? Some of the Things You Learn at TED

A week of TEDGlobal Talks leaves you with many lasting impressions and some very interesting things to mull over – especially after hearing almost 100 hand-picked speakers in under 5 days. Here are some of the fun facts that just won’t leave me alone… Some resources for the future may not come from earth – one […]

TEDGlobal: Why Am I Here?

Why am I here? No, not why am I at TEDTalks. Why am I on this planet? I am here at TEDGlobal with hundreds of people who know exactly how to answer that question. And they can do it in 5 minutes or less. Which is pretty impressive, to say the least. I just finished […]

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On My Way To TEDGlobal!

I leave tomorrow for a week of TEDTalks (Ideas Worth Spreading) at the upcoming TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. The theme this year is perfect as far as I am concerned – “And Now the Good News”. The speaker roster is also exciting, TED is known by its slogan, “Riveting talks by remarkable people”.  At this TEDGlobal there are […]

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Learning from Best Practice: What Can You Do With That?

(Note from me: This (rather long) post was inspired by my partner in this exercise who challenged me to try to blog about our own process reflections. It seemed congruent to frame it as a “How To” – so this is my learning about learning!) In many project documents and programme concept notes you see mention of building on or using learning from […]

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Domesticating Your Facilitator: Mashing Up Technology Adoption with Onboarding a New Facilitator

It is always exciting when you get to work with a new organization as a facilitator or learning practitioner. And at the same time you know that every group has its own everything: processes, policies, values, vocabulary, leadership style, secret handshake. So what can you do to understand that as soon as possible? And what can the […]

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Too Busy to Think?

It is far too easy to fall out of reflective practice when you get extremely busy. Like funding for learning, it might be one of the first things to go when resources get tight (at both the institutional and individual level). Then you don’t take the time to stop and think how you can do […]

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The Capacitator: I’ll Be Back

Trainitation, Facilitaining? When Lizzie and I went through the Certified Professional Facilitator process, there was a Trainer (with a capital T) in our group who didn’t get through (e.g. didn’t get certified). There was a clear division between training and facilitating to which the assessors were incredibly sensitive. I remember myself, in one of the […]

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Who’s the Coach?

Tonight I went to a network meeting at 2, place du Chateau in Nyon. I had made plans at 20:30 to see Lizzie (my co-blogger) afterwards and was a little stressed when at 21:15 the speaker asked the group if he could go over by another 15 minutes. I surreptitiously texted Lizzie under my chair […]

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Paper Free and Fast: Using Posterous for Workshops

I am at a workshop of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Commission on Education and Communication (CEC) in the Scottish Highlands (beautiful, yet not the best place to be when an Icelandic Volcano erupts.) CEC is one of IUCN’s 6 expert Commissions, which are global knowledge networks of individual practitioners that contribute […]

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IUCN’s Commission on Education and Communication: Exploring Social Media Opportunities for Environmental NGOs

This video link was sent to all of us attending the upcoming meeting of IUCN’s (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Commission on Education and Communication. I’m proud to be the Specialty Group Leader for a Community of Practice focused on Learning and Leadership, a group which itself explores new learning approaches. I hadn’t seen […]

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The End of Boring: Borrowing, Adapting, Mashing for Facilitators

I had a design conversation this morning for a one-day workshop that featured 10-15 participants each individually presenting project ideas, one after another. How do you make that interesting (after the third one)? Why not a pecha kucha or an Ignite (the tag line is “Enlighten us but make it quick”)? Both are presentation techniques […]

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(Almost) Foiled by a Doublet: Playing Around With Instructional Games and Puzzles

GROUPTROUP*TROMPTRAMPTRAMSTEAMS I couldn’t believe that this worked, on my first go, after reading Brian Remer’s puzzle instructions in this month’s Thiagi Gameletter (TGL-Seriously fun activities for trainters, facilitators, performance consultants, and managers). Brian calls this instructional puzzle a “Doublet”, and cites Lewis Carroll (of Alice fame) as its originator. In Brian’s description of this puzzle […]

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Look Behind You! The Webinar Facilitator’s Non-Technical Checklist

I am currently in the middle of an online sustainability learning project that includes facilitating a number of webinars (10 to be exact) for a big multi-national company with staff based all over the world. For this project, I am one of a distributed delivery team from AtKisson Associates which is located in North America, […]

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The Changing Face of Learning – It’s Here!

I have just finished writing the report for a very interesting study aimed at a reconceptualising a large organization’s Training Division into a Learning Division, and exploring what that might mean for its structure, task orientation, skill sets, and correlated processes and policies. It was a fascinating exercise in both retrofitting and growing new functionality […]