{"id":148,"date":"2009-10-26T14:07:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T01:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=148"},"modified":"2009-10-26T14:07:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-26T01:07:00","slug":"facilitating-the-unplannable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/facilitating-the-unplannable\/","title":{"rendered":"Facilitating the unplannable"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(aka, my view of how my &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/talks\/20091013.php\">Getting People Onside<\/a>&#8221; workshop at LIANZA09 went.  I&#8217;ve written before about <a href=\"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.blogspot.com\/2009\/09\/planning-unplannable.html\">planning<\/a> and about <a href=\"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.blogspot.com\/2009\/09\/rehearsing-unplannable.html\">rehearsing<\/a> this workshop.)<\/p>\n<p>Ingredients:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/deborahfitchett\/getting-people-onside\">A set of slides<\/a> to structure my intro\/warm-up<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>a bunch of topics on A3 paper for people to cluster around and discuss<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>an egg-timer to keep track of time with<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>a bell to ring to prompt people to move between topics every ten minutes<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>a box to collect email addresses in for those who wanted to join a mailing list to continue the conversation after conference<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The conference organisers arranged for the room to be rearranged beforehand from &#8220;theatre-style&#8221; to &#8220;cabaret-style&#8221;, which terminology provided a certain amount of mirth to my colleagues in the days leading up to conference.  We ended up with nine tables, each furnished with chairs, mints, and writing pads.  I estimate about 60 people turned up, which was a great number.<\/p>\n<p>I started off by introducing where I was coming from with this topic &#8211; basically that conference tends to give you all kinds of great ideas, except that you can have all the good ideas in the world, but if you&#8217;re not prepared and able to deal with the various obstacles\/resistance to change then they may well sink without a trace; so this was a time to think positively and brainstorm about how to be prepared.<\/p>\n<p>We did some warm-ups next.  First, the &#8220;Mexican Wave&#8221; &#8211; because we didn&#8217;t have time to introduce 60+ people, I got people to just call out their first name as my arm swept around the room, and then we repeated that with a couple of other simple questions.  It didn&#8217;t go as fast as I&#8217;d intended:  partly because the shape of the room made it unclear where my finger was pointing, partly because we all fell into turn-taking mode instead of the babbling whoosh I&#8217;d envisioned, and I wasn&#8217;t confident enough to really get more energy in there.  But it still worked and I think achieved its purpose; certainly when we moved on to brainstorming how to respond to the &#8220;50 Reasons Not to Change&#8221;, everyone was quite happy to participate.<\/p>\n<p>And then we split into 10-minute groups.  Well, actually 9 minutes for each one, because I had a close eye on my timer. \ud83d\ude42  I kept the &#8216;ground rules&#8217; up on the slides during these, following a suggestion from the rehearsal.  I sort of hovered and spent a few minutes at each table, occasionally sticking my oar in but mostly just listening, and it was all very cool.  Some of the keywords I&#8217;d come up with as conversation starters were interpreted differently by the participants than how I&#8217;d intended them, but that didn&#8217;t matter in the slightest of course.  During the last <strike>10<\/strike> 9 minutes I passed around my box for email addresses.<\/p>\n<p>Finally we spent five minutes getting someone at each table to report back a highlight or two; and then some kind soul helped me gather all the notes people made while brainstorming, which I&#8217;ve now <a href=\"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/talks\/20091013.php\">duly transcribed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I was really happy with how it went, which of course is all down to everyone&#8217;s participation &#8211; it was exactly what I&#8217;d hoped for when I proposed the session.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(aka, my view of how my &#8220;Getting People Onside&#8221; workshop at LIANZA09 went. I&#8217;ve written before about planning and about rehearsing this workshop.) Ingredients: A set of slides to structure my intro\/warm-up a bunch of topics on A3 paper for people to cluster around and discuss an egg-timer to keep track of time with a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[158,157,152,104],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}