The Consultant’s Curse
Though I’ve been a professional consultant of one kind or another for over forty years, I sometimes still fall victim to the Consultant’s Curse.
Search Results for: facilitation
How OpenAI Has Misappropriated My Copyright: ChatGPT’s Land Grab
I am resigned to the fact that OpenAI‘s Large Language Model ChatGPT has scraped every blog post I’ve written here (over 750 posts in the last 13 years—around half a million words) so it can parrot my thoughts about meeting design, […]
Combining facilitation tools
A June 2023 conference gave me a perfect opportunity to use one of my facilitation tools: Reminders, Sparks, Questions, Puzzles (RSQP). RSQP can be thought of as a highly interactive debrief after an information dump. It’s an efficient way to […]
Zoom avatars—some thoughts
In 2022, Zoom added avatars to their Meetings and Webinars products. Initially, Zoom only offered animal avatars, but custom human avatars were added in 2023. Zoom avatars have received mixed reviews (1, 2), including this reaction from Miguel Neves, Editor-in-chief at […]
Using pair share for group work practice
I’m a big fan of the core facilitation technique pair share. After pairing up participants and providing a short time for thinking about a topic or question, each pair member takes a minute or so, in turn, to share their thoughts with […]
Obsessed with conferences
Hey, meeting planners! Yes, you, you know who you are. Are you obsessed with conferences? Well…hopefully not to the same extent as George Meyer. Speedboats have been a lifelong diversion. Scotch, a serious problem. Yet no vice bedevils me like my […]
Working with both sides
After a school board informational meeting the other day, I chatted with the moderator, Steve John. We discussed several aspects of the meeting, including the difficulty of working with both sides of an issue. It’s rare for groups larger than […]
Facilitation listening as meditation
Most weekdays, my wife and I join a fifteen-minute online meditation offered by teachers at the Insight Meditation Society. The other day, teacher Matthew Hepburn introduced a dharma practice of meditating, not on one’s breath or body sensations, but on […]
Status and power at meetings
Meeting professionals rarely talk about status and power issues. This is unfortunate because the ways that status and power manifest at meetings matter. Why? Because a majority of those who attend most meetings have little say over what happens at […]
Six fundamental ways to make a better conference
The other day, a client booked an hour with me to discuss ways to improve their conference. Not much time, but enough for us to uncover and for me to suggest plenty of significant improvements. Reflecting on our conversation afterward, […]