Monday, June 22, 2015

Facilitation without frontiers: breaking boundaries of time and space with online methods

Last Friday I facilitated a workshop for the #iaf conference in the Netherlands. The theme was 'facilitation without frontiers'.

I started my workshop explaining that many facilitators and trainers immediately start drawing two boundaries when they get an assignment to facilitate:
  1. The boundary of the walls of the workshop venue (everybody who attends is in, everybody who doesn't attend is out). 
  2. Time boundaries (we set a date whether it is for half day, 1 day, 3 days or 2 weeks)
These boundaries limit the quality of the design of the process, because sometimes there are people who are not invited into the space whom could play an important role. You may invite them by skype or by open spaces like Twitter. Furthermore I do not believe in stuffing learning in a set period of for example 1- 2 days. Learn and relearning is a longer process. I am convinced that a blended process works better. Many facilitators already know this and work with longer trajectories but the funny thing is in between face-to-face they loose sight and interest in the process. It becomes like a black box. I believe learning and change processes are better facilitated when with blended approaches.

Below you will find my presentation with 7 examples of breaking those boundaries. It was in Dutch, but it might be visual enough for anybody to understand it.

No comments: