Do you ‘work' the chat box

More training sessions and meetings are online than ever before. But many of these feature just a few dominant voices, taking up most of the air time.

Facilitation skills are needed more than ever.

How do you get people more involved, engaged, participating, learning and contributing? Don't undervalue ... the Chat Box! The chat box in your online webinar/meeting software is a brilliant source of engagement.

Sadly, many presenters, leaders and speakers don’t ‘work it’ and they get caught up in their content and slides, fall behind with the comments or run out of time and miss the gold that’s right there in front of them. Participants in meetings and workshops want to engage and contribute.

The chat box is one place where you can leverage ideas, input, suggestions, questions and comments. It is a skill of being able to work with your content plus an agenda, plus the participants contributing via the chat box. 

How might change ...change

For change leaders in organisations it’s a curious time, looking at the pace and scale of change in the world.

All of those times change leaders struggled to get changes approved, adopted or implemented as they were met with objections and resistance, denial or disagreement.

Now look at what we humans can do. There is evidence now, a kind of precedent that vast change can be made. And swiftly. Resources can be deployed, people can be coordinated and focus can be shifted to new ways of doing things.

Ok yes, some things are required via compliance or directives, but there is still much to see here. There are people to observe, new processes being implemented, new ways of doing things that were ‘too hard to’ previously. Look out for the adjustment, adaptation and the willingness to let go of perfect. There is collaboration and consensus in times when it’s needed ... and it’s happening swiftly.

If we can change like this, how then might change ... change?

How will change be led in the future? Now we’ve been stretched, will we be more willing to change ... or less? Do you lead change: How might change ... change?

We're doing what we thought we couldn't do

“We’re doing what we thought we couldn’t do” - said a frontline worker in an agency I was speaking with last week.

 When new - and different - ways of doing things are forced on us, we have to find ways to make it work. We are responding and solving, getting around obstacles and finding our way through and over things.

Our ingenuity and adaptability is high. Yes, we are doing what we thought we couldn’t do. In some instances, we are now doing what people were trying to have us do years ago. We are doing what people had proposed, requested, asked for and suggested ... many times in the past.

It’s happening in finance, in retail, in medical and health care, in education and training, in human resources, with boards and governance and in industries and sectors all over the world. We are doing many things we thought we could not do.

Let this encourage you to keep finding the things we are currently saying can’t be done... that we know can be. 

Make sense of what you can

It’s not possible to understand or make sense of everything ... you know, not everything! When we are understanding, learning and ‘connecting the dots’ about a situation over a period of time, we are making sense ... sense making.

We do it naturally and instinctively but we can also learn and focus on how to do more sensemaking better, sooner, quicker.

There is value and calm for us focusing on the stuff we can make sense of and to not worry so much about the rest... the chaos. As more information comes to hand about a situation, our sense of the situation grows. We know more. We make more sense. The chaos can become a little less chaotic perhaps.

We can’t know everything all at once. It kind of doesn’t work that way. We will see more and differently as more things come to light for us. There's no need to battle all the chaos, all the time.

Join me as we just make sense of the things we can, progressively, bit by bit.

Lighten the online meeting load

After so many online meetings Urgh! We’re foggy, brain-fried ... like we’re in a continuous conference.

This is the human experience of cognitive overload. But it’s exacerbated and multiplied by the load that’s coming via one channel - online. Yes, its different to face to face, next to each other, same room or space.

Here are 3 COGNITIVE LOAD COPING habits:

☀️Change state and break.

Take a short break between every meeting. Yes every one. It ‘releases’ the mental load you’ve been carrying. Like emptying a truck’s load. Don’t do back-to-back. Bad. Just 30 seconds, get up, move and BREAK your state.

☀️Stop soaking information and start sensemaking.

In every meeting, WRITE some handwritten notes. Not typed. Hand written. This is ‘externalizing’ information. It actively relieves those fried feels.

☀️Write down more than a meeting’s end points, actions or decisions.

Catch a quotable quote, a smile moment, a PHRASE that sounded good. This helps retain some focus.

And it’s ok... you’re not failing.

We’re all carrying around a huge concrete slab of shock, change, worry and uncertainty. That’s already some heavy stuff.

Break your state

Write it down

Catch a phrase