Through attending decades of Vermont Town Meetings, I learned that effective facilitation requires respect. For over two hundred years, my little hometown of Marlboro, Vermont, met at least once a year for “town meeting”: a form of local government where […]
On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, I sat down with Martin Duffy and Paul Nunesdea on LinkedIn Live for an hour’s deep dive conversation about peer conferences: the participant-driven, participation-rich events I’ve designed and facilitated for over thirty years. You can […]
This is not another success story about becoming a writer. Outwardly, I’ve succeeded. Since 2005, I’ve written three successful books on meeting design and facilitation and over 800 weekly blog posts on a wide range of topics. About half a […]
Don’t keep me a secret! For over thirty years I’ve been making clients’ conferences significantly better, for about the cost of a conference coffee break. How? I make conferences better by dramatically increasing attendee satisfaction. Increasing attendee satisfaction increases the […]
I’m looking back on 2023. And, dear reader, get 20% off my ebooks until the end of the year! 2023 in review I slowed down in 2023. Before 2020, I was designing and facilitating around a dozen in-person meetings and […]
While facilitating, I try to remember that we are all different. Here’s why that goal can make me a better facilitator. I can be better than I expect at noticing differences I know that everybody’s fingerprints are unique, though that […]
Why aren’t unconferences more popular? Events and media consultant Julius Solaris shared at the Unforgettable Experience Design Summit that he was initially very enthusiastic about unconference format events. He thought conferences would eventually adopt unconference models. But Julius didn’t see them catch […]
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.
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, […]
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 […]