In the classroom
Interactive class: the first question decides what I'll teach that day
Before I start, I ask what the group knows. When 75% said they had never used AI in Excel, the class I had prepared stopped being useful.
What I've learned facilitating
This is where I write about what has happened to me facilitating workshops, with twelve-person committees and five-hundred-person auditoriums: what went wrong, what I kept patching by hand and, sometimes, the tool I ended up building so I could stop patching it by hand. When I talk about Kai Interact, I do it with the bias of the person who made it.
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Reading the room
A divided, tied or scattered group: the shapes of disagreement and what to do with each one
Disagreement comes in several shapes: divided, tied, scattered and fragile. Each one asks for something different, and mixing them up forces a false consensus.
Large groups
Live polls with QR codes: what I learned in front of 350 people (and almost all of it from what went wrong)
What changes when 350 people answer from their phones, and the failures that repeat: the QR code nobody can scan, the basement with no signal, the latecomer.
Large groups
Hybrid workshop: how to get the YouTube crowd building too (and keep the people in the room from getting all the attention)
A hybrid workshop has two rooms, even if the invitation says one. What I learned so the people joining remotely build too, instead of just watching.
Prioritizing
From brainstorming to a 2x2 matrix without stopping the workshop (or how I stopped copying ideas by hand between two screens)
Ideas always come. The hard part is the next ten minutes, when sixty sticky notes have to become five options to rate without stopping the workshop.
Closing the workshop
Why a workshop ends in a photo of sticky notes (and what it should end in)
My first workshops ended in a photo of the wall. What I learned to leave in its place: agreements with owners, the evidence for each one and what we didn't choose.
Reading the room
Anonymous voting in front of the boss: the average hides the fight
In a committee, everyone agrees until they vote anonymously. Why the average hides the fight, and three things I do differently when I facilitate with executives.
Prioritizing
Fifteen priorities aren't priorities: the quadrant organizes the conversation, you make the decision
An effort versus potential matrix organizes the conversation, but it doesn't decide. When the quadrant is enough and when you need a budget or pairwise duels.
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