Get an inside look at how professional facilitators design and run high-stakes remote meetings. Follow along as we dissect a real 50-person marketing team retrospective, from initial planning through execution and lessons learned. Perfect for anyone looking to level up their meeting facilitation skills or manage large-scale remote collaboration. Read More
Recently, we were asked to facilitate a working session for a leadership team. They were at the beginning of a major organizational change that they… Read More
A couple weeks ago, we recommended using the end of the year and start of the next as a time to zoom out and do… Read More
Surveys show people say less than a quarter of the meetings they attend are a valuable use of their time. In this recording of the August Humanizing Work Meetup, Peter introduces the 6 goals an effective facilitator achieves in every meeting and how to use those to ensure your meetings are reliably worth the participants’ time. Read More
Ever facilitated a meeting that just seems to keep going off the rails? A framing statement is key to starting a meeting strong, and a… Read More
“How can I get the quiet people in my meetings to speak up? Especially since we’ve gone remote, it feels like maybe a third of… Read More
In this episode, Richard and Peter share an agenda you can use for a Sprint Review meeting—or for any meeting where you want to share and get feedback on complex, meaningful work-in-progress. Too many Sprint Reviews are a demo with no useful feedback or a deep dive into the weeds on problem-solving. The best review meetings combine a deliberate demo with a well-structured feedback session. Learn how you can have this kind of review. Read More
It's a classic facilitation blunder: You start giving instructions for an activity, and as you're talking, people begin the activity. You try to reel in those eager participants so you can get the rest of your instructions out. Then, as everyone starts, you realize you forgot something important and need to get the group back together for more instructions. The best facilitators are extremely deliberate about how they give instructions. Read More
Last week, I described how to do the observation step of Focused Conversation without having to talk about all the details. At this point, many facilitators would naturally want to guide the group through interpreting the data. But the Focused Conversation method prescribes another step in between: reflection. Read More
The Focused Conversation method asks us to start with observations before assigning labels - good, bad, effective, worthwhile, motivating, etc. In real-life facilitation, it can feel a little slow to start a retrospective with a simple "What happened this sprint?" Read More