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Episode 164

May 11, 2022

164:Facilitating the Emergence of Possibilities & Breakthroughs with Kimberly Wiefling

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    Intro

    We all hope to facilitate breakthroughs – those “a-ha” moments when participants have a lightbulb over their heads, ideas synthesise, and new ideas emerge.

    But we can’t legislate and plan for them, can we?

    Of course, there are no guarantees… but Kimberly Wiefling (and her approach to facilitation) is as close to a guarantee as you can get!

    Join us in this episode as we discuss failure, emergence, workshop design, behavioural economics, language, and many more topics by way of some deeply personal reflections and storytelling. It’s a wondrous episode!

    Find out about

    • How to facilitate for breakthroughs to occur, rather than leaving it to chance
    • Where physics and facilitation intersect
    • What a workshop of breakthroughs looks like – before, during, and after
    • Why sharing a space and experience is critical to a workshop’s success
    • How to use clothing to influence your creativity (and mindset in general)
    • How using contracts (signed by employee and manager) can codify workshop outcomes

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    And if the idea of NeverDoneBefore 2021, the community of facilitators, caught your attention; click here to explore it in more detail!

     

    Questions and Answers

    01:13When did you start calling yourself a facilitator – if you do? 02:00When was the moment that you realised you are a facilitator, not a trainer? 05:05What have you learned from physics about facilitation?# 09:55How can we detach our own expectations and open our minds up to new possibilities and different realities within a group? 11:13Can you tell us the story of the Chinese horse farmer? 14:10Can we re-engineer confirmation bias to help us find silver linings? 16:25Using first-person narrativisation to reframe our experiences as positive. 19:07How can we use negatives as fuel to change the narrative? 22:40Kimberly shares a perspective-shifting exercise. 25:38What makes a workshop fail? 28:53 How can a facilitator turn up, do nothing, and still make things happen? 36:35What is the one step we can take to make the impossible possible in organisations plagued by ‘learned helplessness? 02:45Might we use the CEO as leverage to create a more innovative company culture? 09:16How do you help groups prevent the ‘workshop hangover’, to maintain their learnings? 14:08Examples of designing our environments to embed change. 16:48Asking questions, posing possibilities, and how facilitators can introduce the idea of change. 20:53Using overeating as an example to look at self-soothing, comforting, and avoidance. 23:36 How time moves differently when we’re energised or burned out. 27:47Facilitating transformational experiences. 29:36 Inviting co-creation by assigning roles in a workshop. 36:37The disempowerment we create as facilitators when we ‘take control’ of a workshop.

    Links

    Kimberly’s website

    Kimberly’s team

    Kimberly’s business

    Two pages full of Kimberly’s free videos, articles, and templates

    Kimberly’s books

    Connect to Kimberly

    On LinkedIn

    On Twitter