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On 9 April 2008, 85 IUCN Staff and visitors welcomed David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (GTD), to IUCN – International Union for Conservation of Nature – at its HQ in Gland, Switzerland. Through a contact of a staff member, David offered to run a full day pro-bono GTD training day event in the […]
(Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash) “What is a DACUM?” I asked, when I received an email inviting me to join one from an IAF learning webinar co-presenter. DACUM, which stands for “Developing a Curriculum,” is an occupational analysis technique developed in the 1960s that employs a panel of master practitioners in a field to “capture […]
There has been a raft of flipped workshops recently where F2F events have been redesigned to be held virtually, and it is fascinating what a rich diversity of designs there are. Some of them have been reworked as big blocks of synchronous together time that aim to closely mimic the programme of the original F2F […]
(Note from Gillian: This is a very long, detailed, and rather geeky post. I write this as I have been asked a few times recently for “how to” information on how to set up these kinds of group work templates for virtual workshops.) As we get more comfortable with getting work done collectively through No-Fly […]
No-Fly Workshops are becoming increasingly popular as people become more sensitive to carbon emissions from air travel, respond to budget freezes or higher scrutiny of trips and travel, and try to profit from the time savings afforded by avoiding long flights or trips to meetings. We know that face-to-face (F2F) meetings are good for social […]
Breakout room 5 (the one on the other side of the building) is out of flip chart paper! Where’s my Key Note Speaker? Anyone seen the group work template for Table 3 (after 2 hours of hard work), it’s not in the stack? The online location for saving the country screencasts has changed to… […]
Released in early July, Pokemon Go – the new location-based, augmented reality game – has been the perfect summer-time companion. It gets people outdoors and moving around day or night. But is it just a walk-around-and-catch-monsters-in-your-backyard game? Maybe I am just rationalizing the hours of playing (that’s me above, Level 20!), but I see some interesting […]
It is always interesting and fun to swap personal productivity systems tips and techniques with others. How do other professionals organize themselves, their information and workflow? How do they keep their tasks and “to do’s” up to date? Do they combine home with work projects? All great questions that we have all pondered at one […]
Attending a TED event is like spending 5 days surrounded by shiny objects – great opening lines to speeches, weird facts, interesting turns of phrase, amazing visuals, and those random ideas that you get that are sparked by something that the speaker says, and more – and from amongst all this having to choose what […]
Believe it or not, one of my most productive work days this week was here. At the risk of no one taking me seriously again, I wanted to write briefly about mobile working… from a water park. Sometimes your kids have a day off, beg you to take them to Aqua Park because it is […]
First of all, I wouldn’t dare give any tips about what exactly to do when you have Presidents, Vice Presidents, members of a Royal Family etc. involved in your event. In my experience, every country has its own preferred protocol, and you can be sure that these high-level people also have a team around them […]
I work with many environment and development groups working together in meeting/conference settings which often match content experts as speakers for audiences of members from their own community (e.g. sustainability experts talking to other sustainability practitioners). Depending on the level of intervention, this reflection often gets labelled as “preaching to the choir”. I’m sure this is a familiar occurrence. […]
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Today I left my phone at home again and only discovered this 20 min before my flight was boarding for a 3-day work trip to Stockholm. Thankfully I had my iPad and computer, both with Skype; not the same as a telephone but would do in a pinch. However, that doesn’t take away the fact that […]
We’ve written a number of posts about both facilitation and the use of online tools for virtual and face to face events. See, for example: ● “The Connected Facilitator: What’s in the Online Toolbox?”, ● “Look Behind You! The Webinar Facilitator’s Non-Technical Checklist”, ● The Two-Day Total Twitter Immersion: Using Twitter for Social Learning“, ● […]
Following part one of this blog post (which shares some examples of tools that are either free or have a “freemium” model and which we think can be usefully used in online facilitation), this part two shares some ideas about how you might adapt facilitation methodologies to an online environment using tools that are either […]
(With apologies, or perhaps thanks to “If You Give a Moose a Muffin“) This is a cautionary tale about why you need to take extra steps to stay productive and focused in a home office. If you give a Gillian an invoice to write, she’ll write the invoice and then she’ll want to complete the […]
I recently facilitated an enormously complex 2-day event, with over 100 people (numbers shifted hourly), multiple process owners, and a continuously evolving agenda. The more exciting things got, the more interventions were sought (e.g. seat on a panel, announcement, chair role, changing speakers, changing titles, etc.) The nature of the event meant that each request […]
Synchronicity. That is the best word I can come up with to describe my first introductions to ‘Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionairies, Game Changers, and Challengers’ – simultaneously via my neighbours the Ortelli’s who know lead author Alexander Osterwalder and rightly thought it was a book I would love, and via my Hub […]
As many of my friends and acquaintances know I am a big fan of Getting Things Done (see the blog’s GTD tag on this, and also the tag on Productivity). One of the GTD tenets is the “Weekly Review” and there are some great resources for this – from the GTD Times article The GTD […]
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 […]
(Note: I went to TEDGlobal this year in Oxford, so this is written from my experience, and may be very different for the other TED events.) Going to TEDGlobal was like jumping into an icy stream, or swimming in Lake Geneva at 4 degrees C. It took endurance, a little craziness, and provided that kind […]
(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 […]
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 […]
I am writing what’s turning out to be a very long report that’s thinking about the evolution of training into learning. And I’m very much enjoying the late night research part, which flicks me serendipitiously through many of the grainy midnight channels of the World Wide Web, as well as into some brighter and more […]
I have been spending the last weeks at my desk developing a shared “curriculum” for a trio of sustainability leadership development programmes in different parts of Africa. I find myself writing about activities that help people make impact in their contexts and communities, and about how to take ideas from rhetoric to behaviour change. That’s […]
Learning can be a useful accelerator for the work you do. It can help keep you motivated, let you experience your progress in a different way, keep you engaged with wider processes. So how can you build more learning into your work life? As a learning practitioner, I asked myself this question, and here is […]
This week I was asked to facilitate a session on “Brainstorming” for the monthly meeting of the Geneva Facilitators Network (linked to the International Association of Facilitators which certified Lizzie and I last December as CPFs). It sounded like a relatively easy brief, however it proved to need some deeper thinking to make it interesting […]
When do you get the opportunity to watch and participate in the work of 10 different facilitators in one day? We did yesterday by hosting a Facilitators’ Demonstration and Learning Day (see previous blog post: Facilitators Demonstration Day – Bringing Together Supply and Demand). We had professional facilitators coming from the Geneva area, neighbouring France, […]
If you look up “Heatseeker” in Wikipedia, you get redirected immediately to “Missile Guidance”, and a long explanation of how these kinds of missiles work to find their targets. However, the top link of this entry is another redirection to Billboard weekly album chart’s Top Heatseekers which refers to a selected list of new and […]
The last panel I went to at the GTD Summit in San Francisco was called “Best Practices to Good Habits: Can I Make GTD Stick?” The panelists were GTD coaches and very experienced practitioners. As can be expected the discussion produced some gold nuggets in the form of tips to making GTD a habit. A […]
In times of extreme change, be they ecological or financial, leadership is a focus of deep discussion and heightened observation, and the source ultimately of trust in decisions and hope in the future. Courage is widely accepted as one important leadership quality. Let’s say that courage is a good thing, we want to see even […]
When people ask us what our unit does, the Learning and Leadership Unit, we often say that we do capacity development by stealth. That is, we focus much more on informal learning than on the more obvious training courses to help build capabilities and improve the overall effectiveness and impact of our organization and its […]
“…Find out what it means to me,” began Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in a speech (Boston, November 2008) which re-resonates with me as I reflect on it, thinking about core values. What are our core-values? Is respect amongst them? And what does respect mean to each of us? Do we confuse it with civility – with habit […]
In our organizations, who are the people igniting the passions of those around them? Who mobilizes the talents of the people they work with and builds collective as well as individual strength of others? Who are the ‘Thought Leaders’? And how are they leading thought? (See Robin Ryde’s short video which inspired this post.) In […]
