Do you make it easier

Today I’m working with a group of leaders on building their facilitation skills.

Facilitation at its heart means ‘ease’, to make progress with ease.

And ease is a great perspective to take.

Ask yourself
- are we making this harder than it needs to be?
- what could we do that would make it easier?
- how can I make it easier for them?
- what does the team think would make it easier?

Easy doesn’t mean it’s not good or not valuable.

It’s about being able to manage and juggle a mix of things happening in teams :

🌕 Engagement - that we are connected to this work

🌕 Involvement - that we are doing something with the work

🌕 Contribution - that we bring our ideas and efforts to the work.

🌕 Productivity - that we are getting the work that needs to be done, done.

The skills of getting people aligned, engaged, inspired and participating doesn’t happen automatically.

You’ll have to do something. Many things. Many micro things that together make great progress.

Facilitation skills apply to work, communities, groups and causes where people are in-person, online and in the changing world of what hybrid work is and how it happens.

This is work I am mildly obsessed with 😁😁

The complex culture of the meeting

They’re groaned at, suffered through and widely reported to be up to as much as 50% a waste of our time. 

Meetings. 

Every meeting you’re in is a complex construction and reflection of the culture in which it exists. 

Online or not, there are elements and behaviours in meetings that 
- include and exclude people
- accelerate and slow the pace of progress
- make the workplace more or less safe
- generate and ideate ... or stagnate and eliminate. 

This article from the World Economic Forum asks us a series of questions about what we do and how we lead in meetings. 

Do we any just accept the toll that poorly led meetings inflict on people and culture? Even when better is possible?

For your own meeting effectiveness and for those you meet with, check through the questions here and take a cultural look at what’s going on when we meet. 

That workshop will need some design

Many of us are leading more workshops and meetings than ever before.

We’re bringing people together, helping them with learning, planning, collaborating, discussing and decision making.

So how do you ensure the workshops you lead are interesting, engaging ... AND effective?

By design.

Successful workshops and meetings come via better design.

And whether we’re leading online or face-to-face sessions, they all require some design ... before the day.

Careful though, because we can also go overboard and over-engineer! There’s a sweet spot where we have designed the most valuable elements and then we can let the rest roll.

Focus on these 4 things in design :

1. Engagement
2. Activities
3. Participation
4. Outcomes.

Determined to make it work this time

There can be those days when we:
- Don’t get done what we hoped we would
- Don’t achieve what was on our list
or 
- Don’t get that breakthrough we were needing. 

We might hope to achieve more ‘next time’ by ‘sitting down and doing better’. 

But berating ourselves in the hope of better outcomes is perplexing. Because what have we really changed? 

If we are just expecting to do better even though we don’t have a new process for it, how could that actually work? 

Our habits and older ways of working kick in.

Unless we change the way we do things, we won’t change what we can do. This is where a safe space to try new ways of doing things can help. 

Join me at ‘the work hack club’. I'm gathering with people who need some of these new ways, plus some accountability and support. We’ll work alongside each other, online, and try some newer, better ways of working. 

It's 
- Focused
- Accountable
- Collaborative
- Supportive

And breakthroughs are guaranteed! Come for one session or make this your more productive habit. Check my website for more details.

To Hack is the Way

The challenges of the modern workplace aren’t new: low levels of engagement and morale, industry disruption putting pressure on the business, silos and disconnected teams, a slow pace of internal change due to resistance or lack of buy in and general busy-ness overload.

It could sound a bit dull and depressing :-( yet when you look a little closer, you might find pockets of the business where ‘all is good’.

For many people, teams and units across a business, a breath of fresh air and a jolt of innovation and inspiration is what’s needed to press ‘reset’ and embark on a new financial year or a new project or kick-off a fresh start. 

So I’m here to tell ya: the hack is the way. 

Yes, the hack.

Not breaking-into-computers hacking, but rather coming-up-with-ingenious-ideas-for-tricky-problems hacking.

Known as the ‘hack day’ or ‘hackathon’, increasingly clued-up businesses are bringing their teams together to identify top talent, reconnect their people, speed up the identification of ideas and shift up the vibe of the business’ culture.

This article gives you three reasons why…  this one reckons all businesses should be hacking. 

Too often in team days or dull planning sessions the loudest voices drown out fresh and upcoming idea makers in a workplace. Or worse, it's a meteor shower of PowerPoint bullet points. And even when ideas are presented, there’s a lack ofaccountability or responsibility or follow through to get things done to see if they’ll actually work. 

So enter, the hack. A half, one or multi-day hacking event is proving to be a culture shaker, an innovation maker and a rut breaker!

Full on input… and output

Through these creative, collaborative, ingenious and full-on sessions, teams work together to design and deliver something; they create solutions to respond to real customer challenges. Whether that's a new strategy, or a new product. With an increasing focus on the customer, businesses of all sizes are seeing this is a sharp and clever angle for competitive advantage.

The hackathon helps develop prototypes that can be put into practice quick smart.

Best of all, you get a taste of agile - a taste of agility and of productivity. You get to play with some of the super human approaches and ways of working of leading global businesses who use hacks to their advantage. Think Google, NASA, Facebook, Salesforce, Uber, eBay, Qantas, Atlassian… 

But hey, hackathons don’t have to be about technology; it’s where they were born, yes, but you can apply hacks to creativity and innovation in almost any aspect of your business, team, unit or industry. 

I recently facilitated a hack session at a multi-industry conference; more than 100 people all working on individual projects and tasks but their outputs could only have been achieved in that timeframe using hacking techniques. It looks like we could be starting to hack the hack!

Cool companies hack

Big and small companies, teams and projects the world over are seeing the benefits of the hack.

They get teams of people together to work intensively and rapidly to:

• create new products
• focus on customers
• align the team and enterprise
• create solutions to tricky problems
• lift innovative thinking and
• create collaborative environments.

And wait, there's more. I love how hack events help you see how people work under pressure.  This type of environment helps you identify top talent, high potentials and high performers who may have been previously hidden, stifled or just uninspired!

Plus it's time to find other ways to break out of those dull ruts and patterns that a team may have fallen victim to over recent times. It's so easy to get comfortable and stay there. 

Most of all I love seeing teams mixing together - particularly when they're working across silos. People are enjoying the work  (because : happiness!) and they're bringing a competitive and cheeky team spirit to the event. The energy is electric and the solutions are often mind blowing!

'Wha?! How did they come up with THAT?' is a phrase that's often heard. 

Customer Focus

With a customer focus, a hackathon or hack day helps create some big reasons to connect and talk more deeply with customers; to research and gather information, to uncover insights and to map out customer experiences. In these insights are genius solutions and ideas that the team can create during the hack. 

Practical ... and Keep Going

Many hackers rave about how practical and productive hackathons are. It's not about talking all day. Yawn! Hack days are about getting sh*t done, doing things. It’s about short sprints of activity over the day or days and teams working rapidly, pushing through doubt or procrastination and experiencing a highly productive environment where delivery is everything.

And then with the experience of the hack, teams take hacking elements back to their workplace and workspace and find they’re able to generate innovative ideas and work productively by applying same, again and again. 

One team I worked with recently continued using their 'Hack Pack': it's a bunch of practices I run in a hack day. When they want to re-live the experience of the hackathon in their everyday work, they simply choose a technique from the Hack Pack ... and go!

7 things

Now, before you go all crazy and book a venue and invite everyone to hack together, think about these 7 things first: 

1. Focus: why are we going to hack and what might the theme be? 

2. Hackers: who's in? Who wants to come, needs to be there or would benefit from the lift of the hack?

3. Schedule: what's going to happen when on the day? What's the schedule of things? 

4. Process: how are you going to hack? What will you do when? Who will facilitate it for you (yes of course, let's talk about this!)

5. Celebrate: how will you cheer on the ideas, outputs and progress the hackers make throughout the day?

6. Implement: how will you bring the prototypes you create to fruition and put them into practice beyond the hack? 

7. Integrate: how will you weave the learnings from the event into your culture for ongoing benefits, ROI and overall hacking goodness?

Your hack plan could look like this...



Leading companies and businesses across so many industries (beyond technology) are learning that today's challenges need new ways of thinking, acting and working. They're looking for better ways to drive creativity and ingenuity - yet all the while still solving problems and challenges. (Oh and let's maintain or strengthen our competitive advantage at the same time!)

When you need to get all of that done, they know - and you do too - that where there’s a hack ... there’s a way!