podcast - viv mcwaters & geoff brown on facilitation

More podcast goodness with Viv McWaters & Geoff Brown (who have their own podcast channel called Winkipod).

Download the mp3.

Show Notes:
00:00 - Introduction - Sick kids, adrenalin junkies & improvisation.
05:00 - Geoff's camping holidays: Being Prepared vs. Having A Plan.
09:30 - Matt bounces up and down on the unscripted trampoline.
11:30 - Facilitation begins long before the event.
16:30 - Facilitation as transformation.
18:20 - What happens "beyond the event horizon"? What are the transitions?
20:00 - "Random Acts of Traction" - Before, During & After.
25:50 - The offer of support.
29:00 - Facilitators as Collective Memory.

i went through a gruelling emotional journey and all i got was this lousy evalution form

I was a witness (& sparing contributor) to the "happy sheet" debate that Viv describes. Evaluation is a tricky thing. And is carried out for many purposes. Evaluation forms are rarely for facilitators or participants in the room. They are artifacts for those that weren't there. Viv's antipathy to evaluation forms reminds me of Johnnie's dislike of action item lists & flip-chart write-ups. We're not comfortable with this touchy-feely stuff and we need the comfort of tangible to ease this anxiety. Provided the workshop generates a big pile of "stuff" (preferably involved spreadsheets & graphs), we can rest easy that time was not wasted and resources misallocated. I don't mind evaluation forms & action item lists. Sometimes taking away comfort blankets is too hard & counter-productive...

creativity & anxiety

Sue Woolfe's approach to writing a novel is that she writes a whole bunch of fragments. Thousands of them. And then she looks for patterns in them. Themes. Voices. Characters. And then the fragments get assembled. Or rather something emerges. The image she used this evening was of creating a skin of narrative to hold together these myriad pieces. Sue is also into neuroscience as applied to creativity - and she talks about some of this here.

One thing Sue said tonight stuck in my mind: The creative enterprise generates a lot of anxiety. And those who succeed at it find a way of dealing with that anxiety. Now a lot of this boils down to "feeling the fear & doing it anyway". But also living with the fear while you are doing it.

It makes me think about the discussion I had with Johnnie on facilitation recently. One thing about being a facilitator is about managing anxiety - both yours & other people's. One way to manage anxiety is to have an incredibly detailed process (which you may or may not follow). I am not a big fan of those for supposedly "creative" activities - because I think creativity is messy & unpredictable - or experimental if you prefer. Another way is to say participants: "trust yourselves". The myriad pieces will come together into something.

One observation to be made is that people get anxious when they are out of the moment. When they are in the middle of "it", experiencing flow, everything's cool. The moment I start thinking "where will this end?" "what is the future?" "will the outcomes be acceptable?" - panic sets in.

So the question becomes: how do you keep people in the moment?

More facilitation patterns - improv & complexity

In all the excitement, I had forgotten Andrew Rixon's new(ish) Babel Fish blog. Andrew talks about facilitation patterns, improvisation & also juggling. And also a link to this post by Viv McWaters about facilitation as improv.

When I started posting about brainstorming, I was viewing it through the lens of improv - though I don't think that came across in the early posts.

Reflecting for a moment, improv is all about co-creating a complex situation. A complex system is where the participants constantly connect with and influence each other. That's what makes it impossible to predict what will happen next. The lack of a script or fixed roles increases the opportunities for contact & influence. And the "rules" of improv (which are more like rules if you are not experienced and more like patterns if you are*) aim to further increase the opportunities for contact, feedback loops & mutation. When improv is done well, you are watching an emergent complex social system unfold like a bonsai tree in front of your very eyes. And the knob gags are just a bonus.

*In fact, the development of expertise can be seen as the conversion of rules into patterns.