When was the last time you worked on a project that had unlimited resources, no guidelines, and no timeline? Probably never. It’s not realistic to receive a prompt without parameters. And that can actually be a good thing, because creativity requires some constraint. I’m not talking about the types of…

In a recent poll, many of my fellow facilitators shared that the most challenging part of designing a workshop lies in picking the right methods and activities to apply, then pacing against them.

These 8 tips will help you find more self-assurance in your professional life. Why aren’t more working women more confident? I ask this having recently had conversations with women in my professional circles who’ve shared that they just don’t have the confidence they wish they had. This is a trend…

Have you ever showed up to lead a workshop and found that all the whiteboard markers were dried out? Or nobody brought pens? Or there wasn’t any paper on hand for sketching exercises? With the return of more in-person work comes the return of more in-person workshops, and that means…

A tip to help you neutralize power dynamics in groups — Recently, I posed a question to my peers about using titled or de-titled introductions when beginning workshops, and the responses were unanimous: de-titled intros are preferred. Why is it so powerful, and what benefits does doing so bring to the workshop space? It helps neutralize politics. Titled intros establish a…

To lead a meeting well, you should know how to handle conflict, confrontation, and challenge — I recently polled my community to see which aspects of facilitation people feared most. My guess was that the majority of respondents would select “public speaking” as their leading fear factor, but that wasn’t the case. Now, I know this is a small sample size, but 75% of my respondents…

When facilitating teams embarking upon strategic work, one of the most important alignment exercises you can cover is defining what success looks like. Teams tend to get into a lot of trouble when they get too far down the road without first tackling this step because success looks different to…

You know that really long follow-up email that goes out after most meetings? The one full of proposed next steps, assigned roles and responsibilities, and about 10+ people CC’d? Well, this exercise aims to eliminate the need for a follow-up email and asks teams to align on what should happen…

Assets and liabilities is an exercise I often facilitate with teams to take an inventory and drive a shared understanding of what’s working for and against the team. It’s also an excellent way to capture inputs from people who don’t typically work together (where competing perspectives may be at play). …