Ask, Not Tell

I finished the International Association of Facilitator (“IAF”) conference in Kuching and am now on the way to KL whilst I am writing this post.

 Key Take-Away

 One of my key take-away is rather conceptual i.e. ‘What is facilitation?’   The conference clarified for me what this term means, or at least what some people refer to by the word ‘facilitation’.   In fact, the word ‘facilitation’ is so widely used that different people mean different things in using it.  In the IAF word, ‘facilitation’ means very much pure facilitation i.e. facilitator being content neutral.   If lecturing is one extreme type of group processes, pure facilitation is its exact opposite.   The one who conducts the (pure) facilitation i.e. facilitator can know nothing about the content of discussion. Read more

I start my ‘journey of facilitation’ today – I will spend a lot of time either learning facilitation or really facilitating in the coming 4 weeks in Kuching, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei and Beijing.  (In fact, this intensive journey started 2 weeks ago since I facilitated 8 days in Shanghai).

I am writing this post on the plane to Kuching where I will attend the IAF conference.   I will then work with our Group office to conduct a workshop in KL.   In Taipei, I will help out to run a SPIN class.   And in Beijing, I will run a presentation class and an influencing skills class.   I look forward to learning a lot during these trips.   Love to share here.  Stay tuned!

• Course: 1 day influencing skills course
• Date: 21 Aug 08
• Location: Shanghai, China
• # of Learners: 20
• I am feeling: Good

The class was attended by a few other fellow trainers in our organization. At the end of the class, one of them asked me whether I become bored after delivering some classes for almost 2 years. My answer was a bit complicated:

- I do look forward to taking on new classes rather than just delivering the old ones. I love the process of preparing and delivering the new material, during which I learn a lot as well.

- On the other hand, I am not exactly bored with the old classes… at least not as much as the others would probably imagine. I believe the key is that my delivery focuses on the learners but not the content. Since the learners are different each time, the class is ‘virtually’ not the same.

• I often collect expectation at the class beginning and tailor the class accordingly without compromising the key message of the original design;
• I always ask lot of questions in classes and there are all different sorts of response. Well, arguably, I asked too much some time;
• I encourage questions in the class by different techniques and tricks. See one trick I shared before on this blog.

• Course: A presentation skills workshop
• Date: 18-19 Aug 08
• Location: Shanghai, China
• # of Learners: 10
• I am feeling: Good

It is the first time I customized a presentation skills workshop for a specific business line in our bank.   Unlike an open course, I had a specific business sponsor who ‘ordered’ this class.  Since I personally worked in this business line before, I managed to communicate effectively with the learners re the presentation content as well.

I hope the learners had found it useful!!

I was one of the participants in a short group discussion session last week.   Like other facilitated sessions, there was a debrief session after some activities.  The facilitator asked a question verbally for us to discuss within individual table teams.   What the facilitator intended to ask is ‘How effective do we learn from our daily work?   Please indicate by a percentage of time when you really learnt something you want.’  Unfortunately, different teams understood differently about what was asked.   Read more