Serendipity and Learning

 A 4 day workshop in these days? Are you crazy? Sitting in front of a screen for 4 days?  Yes. And the fantastic team from Reflexive Lenses pulled it off. And I learnt a lot.  1. The sessions were tightly managed. Started on the dot, finished on the dot. (This is something I have come to love about virtual trainings. Almost every workshop has started and ended on time.) 2. There were many experts. Since this was a deep dive expertise was needed - and the team had an expert assigned to every virtual room. This was very useful - gave us the comfort of small group interaction, allowed us to dive deep and also allowed for expert interaction. This was very well thought I felt.  3. The break out room is a scream. The way it counts down and drags you into the main sessions is incredible. Usually as a facilitator when you get the team to work on activities, it is a struggle to get them to complete and come back to the main discussion. This was superb. 4. Almost all activitie...

As someone who has facilitated numerous workshops, sessions, labs and gatherings face to face like many others, I have been sceptical of Virtual facilitation. However in the past few months, I have handled Onboarding of leaders, run a virtual webinar with nearly 400 members in the audience, run sessions with 100+ attendees and run smaller cosier webinars with less than 20 attendees. The topics have ranged from Onboarding Leaders to Interview skills to Creativity workshops (who would have imagined) to Strategy workshops (indeed). Up until now, while I had handled virtual webinars, it never seemed like the real thing. It was seen as a poor substitute to face to face workshops.  I must admit, I am learning the tricks of the trade as I do so and enjoying the challenge! And every webinar I think I am unlocking newer levels of effectiveness. Some tips: Animation - used well is a great way to progress on a topic Chat window - Both the group response and the private window are fantastic to...

Can you craft a workshop for 200 odd people? Was the underlying question of a leisurely call a few months ago. The idea was enticing, ticked all the boxes of creativity, comfort zone (out of), challenge, credibility (of who it came from) and purpose (who it was for). And I found myself saying yes. As soon I kept the phone down - I began to think. I have done large format working sessions, handled large offsite gatherings, given speeches at conferences and spoken at panel discussions - but none of them were 4 hour long and none of them were workshops - with this level of interactivity. And then began the planning. Creating an xls with the plan, the detailing of each segment, curating content for each slide - running it through the lens of 200 people audience, talking to people who think differently - thinking of audience engagement, audience interest and takeaways - planning each aspect of the workshop, scripting, rehearsing, inserting an activity, anticipating questions. And t...

A few weeks ago, we got an opportunity to work on an Influencing Skills workshop.  Now this is a commonly requested workshop and is run in many flavours - from communication to networking to negotiation - depending on the ask. When Madhu reached out to me, we thought how could we make it different from what is already there in the market. After a few days of intense effort, a design emerged as did a model (more on the model soon). What we worked with as the outcome was that in this day and age, many of these concepts need to be worked on differently - both from a delivery and a design standpoint. Madhu being a theatre expert - we attempted to weave in theatre concepts to bring out each element of influencing. For example, we put the team into an activity that was tough right at the start that brought out their own 'blocks' on 'influencing'. And rather than talk about it in the head - they experienced it in the activity and from there, was far more easier for them...