Facilitate Proceedings » Blended facilitation

July Webinars – How to keep participants fully engaged

Julia Young — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:50:17 +0000

With our Interactive Webinars series, we’ve been exploring the concept of building highly interactive elements into virtual meetings and webinars. We invite anyone who is interested in exploring these ideas with us to engage in an interactive experience of creative thinking about ways to design collaborative activities in what is too often a one on many, presentation heavy format. Our series continues this month with more opportunities to collaborate on ideas about designing interactive webinars and virtual meetings. We’ve got two great webinars planned for July.

Strategic Planning in Second Life

Julia Young — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:38:45 +0000

Strategic planning in Second Life plays out in this YouTube video of a session with IBM and Schneider Electric. I am left wondering if the technology really creates the engagement that the narrator mention or if the technology simply prompts the meeting planners to design in more interaction than a typical virtual meeting.

Synergy or Oxymoron? Reflections on Asynchronous Facilitation

Gurpreet Gil — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:54:10 +0000

In this research brief I will share some of the experience of Synergy, a project exploring the use of collaborative meeting software to facilitate asynchronous group activities.

Most staff developers see themselves as facilitators of the learning process – knowledge is distributed throughout the organisation and the learning process happens when people successfully collaborate with others. The role of the facilitator is to encourage this process by providing a clear framework for discussion, creating opportunities for dialogue to occur across different groups and communities of practice. Sounds great doesn’t it? If only it were that easy!

In reality, availability of the right people at the right time is often a major issue and what appears to be a successful outcome for the group who attended can subsequently be undermined by the absence of key individuals. This is where collaborative meeting software comes in, by offering a solution that enables people to be involved in a facilitated meeting, irrespective of their geographical location and existing diary commitments.

Blended Facilitation: Have Your Cake (And Eat It Too)

Danuta McCall — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:27:13 +0000

Several blogs and news portals have picked up on a Forbes Insight Study conducted in June ‘09 that found 84% of the 760 business execs surveyed preferred face-to-face meetings over virtual contact, even though the economic downturn had obliged many of them to reduce travel and adopt technology solutions for virtual meetings. Executives identified the following benefits from face-to-face meetings: building stronger, more meaningful relationships (85%), the ability to “read” another person (77%), and greater social interaction (75%). 80% felt that face-to-face interaction with co-workers is necessary for effective teamwork and complex decision making.

As I read, I frequently felt like chiming in with “yes, AND….” (as a consultant, I rarely if ever say “yes, but…”). In my opinion, the paradigm of either/or – virtual or face to face – is a limiting context in which to evaluate business collaboration. Thanks to collaborative technology, it’s simply no longer an all or nothing proposition.

We at Facilitate.com are great proponents of “blended facilitation”.

When Virtual Learning Is Better Than Face To Face

Danuta McCall — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:44:16 +0000

Is it possible that virtual learning can be more effective and not just a compromise when budgets get cut? When might virtual learning actually be advantageous? Here’s a list of potential winners – opportunities to accomplish more in a virtual setting than in the traditional classroom.
When you look at it through this lens, transitioning from traditional learning methods to ones that work in the virtual world looks less like a necessary evil and more like an exciting opportunity.

We have just published a white paper entitled Designing Interactive Webinars to add to our webinar and article series on collaborative learning in the virtual workplace.

More Great Tips (And An Invite) For Running Interactive Webinars

Julia Young — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:01:12 +0000

After my recent posts about boring webinars I was surprised to learn how many people are ok with the expectation that their participants will multi-task. If we were designing an in-person meeting, workshop or training session, would we assume that participants would be working on their email, having side-conversations or searching the Internet? I think not! We would create an agenda that keeps people engaged and challenges them to think creatively, share ideas, ask questions, solve problems, role play, test assumptions, take another point of view …

The level of interest in this topic has prompted me to offer the first in as series of free webinars on this very topic – How to Get Great Results from Virtual Meetings and Webinars. Please click here to register for this event on Wednesday, July 22nd at 8:00 AM PDT (11:00 AM EDT; 4:00 PM BST).

My posts generated a good conversation across various social media about what it takes to make webinars interesting and engaging. Here is an edited compilation of some of the tips and techniques I found most useful.

5 Surefire Tips For Running An Effective And Engaging Webinar

Julia Young — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:04:52 +0000

In a previous post, I admit that I ranted just a bit about the state of webinars, and how almost all fall short of the engaging and memorable experience we would hope they could be. The core issue is that webinars tend to be big on slides and small on interaction. I have spent a lot of time recently coaching clients on how to transform their training webinars into rich collaborative events. Here are some of the tips I shared…

Design your agenda with a distracted participant in mind.
Assume that participants will be multi-tasking unless you keep them fully engaged with tight content, lively speakers, no more than 10 minutes or three slides of talking before a fully interactive exercise, and more than fifty percent of time spent collecting and responding to ideas, questions, perspectives from participants. Obviously the process will vary if you have 10 or 100 people on the call but don’t give up on the engagement even for large groups.

7 Steps to Effective Distance Learning in Challenging Times

Julia Young — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:01:04 +0000

Sometimes it’s hard to find the silver lining in a difficult situation – take the workplace in a recession for example. With even the healthiest companies implementing severe cut-backs and staff reductions, those who remain at their jobs often have to take on additional responsibilities. And with training being one of the first expenses to go, they struggle to acquire the skills they need to succeed.

Distance learning is one way to address the problem of building the critical skills and morale of the workers left on the scene. Nancy Settle-Murphy and I have just written an article mapping out several important steps to creating the kind of multifaceted distance learning program that will result in employees who are equipped and ready to take on the challenges during the economic downturn and beyond.

Get More out of Your Client Advisory Boards

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:14:45 +0000

Whether they’re called client advisory boards, user groups, or customer feedback sessions, most such meetings are held face-to-face, and for good reason. But clients’ overbooked calendars coupled with budget restrictions means that you can’t convene these groups as often as you would like – unless you can find a way to arrange a virtual advisory board meeting that will keep people focused and engaged. Here are some points to remember:

Boost Your Teams Using “Blended Facilitation”

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:30:48 +0000

Let’s say you have a geographically dispersed team that’s pressured to deliver results within an absurdly tight timeframe. “Blended facilitation” enables members of a hybrid team to make the most out of their meeting time, wherever they are. By blended facilitation we mean using a combination of facilitation tools and approaches, either synchronously (in “real-time”), asynchronously (at different times) or both.