Finally Viv and I are releasing our new book into the wild.
It’s called Creative Facilitation – Bringing Meetings to Life. At one point I was going to call it We can’t go on meeting like this as it represents a lot of our ideas for challenging conventional, tired meeting formats.
The trouble with writing a book is that it’s out-of-date as soon as you finish it, and we had to steal ourselves to publish-and-be-damned, and avoid the tyranny of excellence. So we cover our tracks with this statement right at the start:
There can never be a definitive guide on how to facilitate. What we try to do with this book is to draw on our experience facilitating in many different countries and cultures, from Scotland to the Solomon Islands. We’ve pulled together our reflections so that you can decide for yourselves, in the light of your own unique experiences, how you’d like to carry on the craft for yourself. There will be ideas in here that make sense to you, some that don’t, and some that may seem to contradict each other. The challenge is to take from this what is useful to you and reflect on what challenges you.
You can download it as a pdf file from this link.
Here’s a summary of the content:
Part One: Why Facilitation? is about exploring the impact of facilitation and facilitators on groups, the qualities that make for good facilitators and some of the underlying philosophy that underpins our approach.
Part Two: Workshop Basics is about the necessary foundations of facilitating workshops.
Part Three: Beyond the Basics is about providing an understanding of how to engage
people and use different approaches.
Part Four: Creative Facilitation explores some of the knowledge and understanding that helps facilitators step into complex, and sometimes difficult, situations. It also explores in more depth, elements of human behaviour and group dynamics.
Part Five: Resources provides suggestions for developing your own “toolkit” with what you learn from experience as well as useful links, resources and other information.
We’re giving this book away with a liberal Creative Commons licence, so feel free to share.
We’ll probably release another version soon designed specifically for printing and a print-on-demand service.
