Category: online facilitation

From the Archives: Anatomy of an Online Event in 2009

From the draft archives (we are approaching the end of 2009!), there is some interesting differences and similarities between our online events today and in 2009. Check out these slides from Lucy Garrick. Lucy, what would you recommend today? 🙂

Virtual Open Space Conference 5.09.



 

OLD! The “chairs” technique for synchronous web gatherings

Blast from the past!

This will give you a laugh about the types of things we were doing back in the early 2000’s for synchronous online interaction. This is a conversational snippet from the now defunct CPSquare community (a community about communities of practice.) Skype allowed us global teleconferencing, but no video at the time. I love that dredging this up reminded me I learned the technique from Fernanda Ibarra! The image referred to in the conversation is below. Ah, the days of clipart. More from 2010.

Picture of a circle of cartoon clipart chairs with a name underneath some of them and instructions in the middle.
Just used this today with a group of people most of whom had not used Skype  for teleconferencing before.   I posted the slide  (modified to arrange the chairs in clock mode as you talked about in the FCoP telecon the other day) as a google presentation.  Names were ready in the center and to open I asked people to “take a seat” by moving their names — demonstrating by moving mine.  Then we used the result for the speaking order (group was small  — only 8 people)  — it worked like a charm  — Fernanda Ibarra and Nancy White — you are  geniuses! As you said in your guest appearance at FCoP earlier this week, small things do indeed make a big difference.  One person mentioned the “chair thing”  as an example of “what worked” at the end of the call when we did a round robin of what worked, what didn’t, what would you do differently — so I had the opportunity to mention that I learned about the circle of chairs from you!

best,

Ann Braun

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 4:00 PM, < Help_in_Real_Time@conversations.cpsquare.org> wrote:

Excellent Webinars Reply #10
Posted onSat Feb 07 2009 19:19:00 GMT-0100 (PST)
Nancy White-
One Small Interactive Exercise per Webinar
I learned this small trick from Fernanda Ibarra, who I think is a Foundations alumna as well, so maybe we can lure her here. She showed me the value of doing some small, easy interactive exercise at the start of a webinar which stealthily increases people’s familiarity with the tool and adds something to the meeting.
Fernanda taught me about the chairs. She puts up a slide (I’ve attached my version) at the start and asks everyone to use the text tool to put their name under a chair. This sets the sense of group/circle/conversation, acquaints people with the whiteboard tools and is an easy, non-intimidating task.
Attachment: chairs.ppt

Designing and Hosting Virtual Field Trips (MOIP #10)

Moving Online in Pandemic is now #MOIP! This is 10th in a series of posts about the tidal wave of moving online in the time of Covid-19. #1, #2, #3,  #4 , #5 , #6, #7, #8 and #9.

I’ve mentioned my work with the Floodplains by Design network over the past few years. We have been doing a lot of experimenting and practicing with online meetings and events over the last 11 months. We captured a few of our practices and now I’ve drafted an article on Virtual Field Trips. And yes, I’m looking for your review to help improve it. Right now it lives on a Google doc where you can comment. You are also welcome to comment generally here. Care to help? I’ll post the intro below. And THANKS!

1. Introduction

At the Floodplains by Design (FbD) Culture and Capacity Action Group (C&C) November 2020 meeting, we recently reviewed and reflected upon our experiences and value of field trips to FbD project sites. (See figure 1.) COVID-19 has curtailed our face to face field trips, demanding a new, virtual way of meeting these needs. 

With the C&C’s focus on building and supporting a learning network, we are interested in the overall set of learning and network weaving practices that can help spread and deepen IFM. This document offers insights and useful practices for designing and implementing virtual field trips (VTS) to support Integrated Floodplain Management (IFM). It also helps us share in general the value of, and practices around field trips which are useful in our work together whether we are F2F or together online. It builds on our first document on Virtual Peer Assists.

We hope that through these occasional articles/resource documents we can make our learning more widely available across the FbD network and beyond. 

The first section of this document  reflects more generally on the purpose and value created through field trips. The second section addresses specific practices for planning and executing virtual field trips. A resources section follows for additional information.

Figure 1: Harvest from the November 2020 brainstorm on VTS

We created this first draft of useful virtual field trip practices using four guiding questions. 

  1. What general immediate and longer term value is created through field trips in our integrated floodplain management (IFM) work? This establishes a shared baseline understanding of field trips in IFM. 
  2. What specific purpose(s) and value creation do field virtual trips serve in our work right now? With whom? Clear purpose drives how we design our VFTs.
  3. What useful field trip practices have we learned for VTFs?
  4. How might we know when we are making progress on this purpose? Like any practice, we assume that as we learn, we can improve our practice.

I’m happy to post more here if that is useful… and know the doc got pretty LONG!

MOIP #9: What I’ve Learned This Spring

Working from home… in the bedroom version!

I wrote this short article for our Liberating Structures extended network of practice. I thought it might be useful here too!

The last few months have been rich with lessons for our amazing global network of LS practitioners, and all the sub-communities it holds. Here are my lessons that have been surfacing:

  1. Creative destruction RULES. DEConstruct before trying to REConstruct offline events into the online space. TRIZ is our friend!
  2. The six knotworking questions are SUPER useful at this moment in time for developing flexible, emergent plans. 
  3. Critical Uncertainties was MADE for this time!
  4. This is an oldy, but a goody: slow down to go fast. While we can dance with abandon at the novelty as we move and reframe different Liberating Structures online, we must also hold space for people to move forward together when the moment calls. This translates to fewer structures piled into an online meeting, holding generosity to extend our practiced F2F timings and keeping technical options at the min specs, vs max specs. (Purpose to Practice is helpful here!)
  5. Ask for help. Ask specifically and offer your first ideas. This way people are more likely to respond and respond generously. As our Slack community grows and grows, we want each person to find and offer value. So ask as specifically as you can. Show you have done a little thinking already…
  6. Offer help! The connections we create through these asks and offers weaves our network.

There is a LOT more… right now I’m processing what I’ve learned through three series of rather intense online events, thinking about time, space, embodiment, humane-ness and all sorts of good stuff. So more to come. But if I wait to “finish” this, I will never finish this!!

What have you been learning?

MOIP #7: Virtual Peer Assists

I’m shortening the title… Moving Online in Pandemic is now #MOIP! This is 6th in a series of posts about the tidal wave of moving online in the time of Covid-19. #1, #2, #3,  #4 , #5 and #6. This time a client has graciously allow me to share their story!

I’ve been having a great time working with the Floodplains by Design Network (FbD), particularly the Culture and Capacity Building Action Group (C&C in our shorthand!). C&C members have targeted peer to peer (P2P) learning as an important tactic for identifying and sharing knowledge. One form of P2P learning is to ask for and get help from peers. Peer Assists are one format for the giving and getting of help. They help tap both local and network wide knowledge, support local contextualization (no “one ring to rule them all” as Frodo might wish), and are easy to do. Some even say it is pleasurable! This Spring the C&C members have committed to at least two Peer Assists.  And to make them accessible across our wide geography, we decided to do them online. That turned out to be a wise choice given the Covid-19 outbreak. 

About Peer Assists

There are many ways to do PAs. You can simply call up another network member and talk about your challenge. This is helpful for matching specific expertise with a specific need — and we recognize we need to figure out a mechanism so FbD members can easily find each other for this sort of direct exchange. 

We also benefit from a diversity of views. Sometimes the most helpful ideas come from the “unusual suspects” and people who see and experience the world differently than we do. Here are some variations to consider:

  •  Troika Consulting , User Experience Fishbowl and Wise Crowds are three of my “go-to” peer assist variations. They create simple “containers” for people to get direct help on a challenge. The difference is that Troika works in an intimate trio, Wise Crowds uses rotating small groups to enable multiple people to get peer assistance, and Users Experience Fishbowl supports two layers of support – direct and indirect. It is a bit of hybrid option. 
  • If you are trying to elicit expertise, instead of trying to apply it in context, you can try  or Celebrity Interview. THis is not exactly the same thing as peer to peer assistance, but by asking people questions, we often get more and deeper insights than if they just did a presentation. It is more engaging for those watching as well. 
  • Appreciative Interviews help pull out current success upon which we can build. So maybe one watershed has really made huge progress, but we can’t quite figure out how to make that same progress in our watersheds. Discovery and Action Dialog can help us discover who is succeeding where the rest of us are struggling. (A way of surfacing positive deviance!)

C&C’s First Peer Assist

In early April we had our first Peer Assist, helping Kat, a member move her work on a strategy element forward. She was looking for ideas about how to frame and build a strategy element that reflected views FROM the network, so a Peer Assist seemed useful. She identified some people she wanted present and others from the C&C volunteered to be her consultants. To help shine a light on the process and add another layer of support we invited the whole C&C to be the “bowl” of the fishbowl. 

We convened on the Zoom video conferencing platform. In an hour Kat laid out her challenge, the “consultants” asked clarifying questions, and then Kat turned her back to her computer screen while her consultants talked about her challenge. After about 20 minutes she turned around, shared the key insights she gained and thanked her consultants. 

At the end, we debrief and came up with the following observations to help improve our next Peer Assist:

  • Great way of engaging. It takes courage — and you need to be truthful and honest about the feedback. Incorporate it in and be willing to accept the harsh reality.
  • Lesson: French Revolution – king reached out but didn’t do anything with the input! Input –> heard, seen, respected and USED!Suggest that problem statement for peer assist be elaborated in written text and distributed to panel in advance so they can gather thoughts / questions
    •  +1 Some of my best thinking happens during drives/walks/showers/doing the dishes…
  • From a Bowl person: Not quite sure how to engage, questions are relevant, but didn’t know what process looked like. How does this all work? (Lesson: not everyone got the same instructions in advance due to later additions of participants. Don’t let that slip through the cracks.)
  • If more time engage the outer ring
  • What would be a valuable question for a peer assist? Examples of questions, projects in different stages. 
  • How do we know about peer assist tool? Share more about the methodology (this article!)
  • In times of Covid and working at home with kids → Evening Peer Assists after kids go to bed
  • Humor: happy hour assists might cross certain lines, but the feedback would flow

Want more tips on how to do Peer Assists? Online and need to learn how to use zoom? 

Want the geeky process details? Here is an outline of how you can set up your own Peer Assist using Users Experience Fishbowl method:

Preparation: 

Identify your peer assistee. Ask if they have individuals they want as their consultants, and/or cast a net more widely. You do NOT need a large group. In this particular variation 3-4 consultants in the fishbowl with the peer assistee provides time for depth and sufficient intimacy for the conversation. Other useful folks are the “bowl” observing and sharing other ideas in chat which can be processed by the assistee later. 

For a small group, one person can guide the process and take note. If there is a larger “bowl” of people it can be helpful to have one person to take notes in addition to the facilitator.

Invitation: 

Send an invitation out. Draft copy below…

Thanks for being willing to do a peer assist. We are doing a peer assist variation called “Users Experience Fishbowl” where a small group of people support a person with a challenge or question (the “fish”) while other observers listen and respond afterwards.

Please come and help NAME OF PEER ASSISTEE think about her next steps with the CHALLENGE PERSON HAS. ADD THE PERSON’S CHALLENGING QUESTION HERE.

Technical Details: We’ll meet on a Zoom video platform so ideally you need a mic and a camera attached to your device. Best is a computer, then tablet, then phone. Log on a few minutes early if you are new to Zoom to make sure everything is running well. Due to the huge current loads on Zoom, sometimes it takes a few tries to get into a Zoom room… the days we live in!

Preparation: In preparation, we’ll send you WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO SEND. KEEP IT BRIEF to skim as time is available. Mostly bring your ears, your brains, experiences and insights from your floodplains work. 

The X NUMBER OF FISH – YOU CAN NAME THEM will be ASSISTEE’S NAME consultants.  Other interested folks will observe the process, staying off camera and just listen/ take notes in the Zoom chat.

How this will work: Tight 60 minute agenda

  1. 10 minutes: Brief introductions both of fish and “bowl folks.” 
  2. 5 minutes: PEER ASSISTEE shares their challenge. (It is helpful if this builds on what was sent in advice, versus telling the same thing again.)
  3. 3-5 minutes: Consultants ask clarifying questions (no ideas, suggestions or their own stories yet.)
  4. 15-20 minutes: PEER ASSISTEE will turn off her Zoom camera, turn around with a notebook and simply listen as you talk about her challenge. She will not nod her head, respond, rebut or interject in any way. JUST LISTEN. As consultants, talk amongst yourselves with advice, experience, comparable stories. Range freely and think boldly. Dive into your experiences and data. The notetaker/facilitator will take notes. 
  5. 5 minutes: PEER ASSISTEE will turn around and thank you, and if they want, share the most useful things they heard from you. They will share her next step in addressing their challenge.
  6. 10 minutes: Invite the observers to share any highlights or comments they noticed.
  7. 5 minutes: Debrief the process and outcomes.