Social Media Marketing

We just attended a half-day business booster mini-workshop, run by a friend, Terry Carney, on ‘Social Media Marketing’. The session was really informative around what’s out there, what works and what doesn’t, how to join up all your business related social media, to ensure it’s consistent, to the point, relevant and useful.

The session also high-lighted some really good do’s and don’ts, pitfalls and possibilities that can drive benefit and business to companies.

Terry, who ran the programme, also manages a Business Booster LinkedIn group which you can find at http://www.linkedin.com/groups/BUSINESS-BOOSTER-GROUP

Product Innovation Stimuli

We recently facilitated a product innovation workshop for a corporate client looking to break out of existing product paradigms.

We put a lot of effort into making sure we had both related and un-related stimuli on hand to help people see things in different ways and explore new and fresh ideas. This included a large table of related products, some of the clients and many from competitors, several mood boards of ‘what the future might hold and look like’ and a really good, varied selection of magazines and periodicals, a few related to the clients field but most not!

We also showed a couple of thought provoking video clips from You Tube which incorporated lots of stats, numbers and provocative statements about the future, this gave us additional food for thought!

With all this stimuli we were really able to stretch and pull the clients existing paradigms around products and generated some really great ideas to work up into full product propositions.

Combining Virtual preparation with Multi-Cultural Facilitation

We recently worked with a global corporate client to design and facilitate a 2 day global strategy workshop with 8 different multi-cultural regions, Russia, Ukraine, Europe, USA, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Nearly all the pre-workshop contact, consultation, design and preparation was carried out remotely and virtually making good use of e-Mail, Word, PowerPoint and especially Skype! The workshop design went backwards and forwards several times and a ‘few’ Skype calls later we had our 2 days mapped out and the client was happy. Virtual working is definitely enabled and enhanced through the ability to see one another.

During the workshop, all geographic regions were represented; the challenges as we progressed through our agenda were not unexpected: language, communication styles (soft and hard, direct and subtle), misunderstanding meaning and perceived cultural hierarchy (in part influenced by the level of maturity of local markets) all had to be embraced.

To overcome these challenges some basic but critical techniques we employed were:

• collectively building meaningful workshop guidelines and actively using them;


• making sure we managed perceived and actual hierarchy in the room by making certain


• everyone was included, listened to and heard and NOT interrupted;


• giving opportunity for table discussion in native/first language;


• speaking clearly and slowly and asked others to do the same;


• asking others to help and support those who’s English was not as confident;


• summarising and paraphrasing more regularly


• 
  
  seeking to use lots of praise and thankyou’s!

It was a really rewarding engagement. We’ve definitely seen an increase in the need for cross-cultural work in the last 4-5 years and we’ve found these basic ‘top tips’ help the group make good progress.

Farewell to Sarah

Our recent public ‘Building Resilience’ event was also our last chance to work with our friend and colleague Sarah Willis before she moved on to pastures new. The event was a big success, with great feedback and was a fitting end to Sarah’s time at circleindigo.
One of Sarah’s central passions and themes in her life and work is about enabling and developing young people. So she is very happy to share the news that she is going to be the National Lead on a programme called Positive Futures for Catch 22 www.catch-22.org.uk a charity that enables young people to develop their confidence, skills and potential. She will carry her great experiences from circleindigo into her new role and will remain connected to the community of circleindigo clients and friends.
We wish Sarah every success in this new chapter of her working life, focussing on the area she has always had immense passion for.

Building Resilience Event

Based on the research ‘Being Resilient’, carried out with the University of Westminster, Business Psychology Centre (BPC) Business Psychology MSc programme we recently ran a public ‘Building Resilience’ event called ‘Resilience - Push Pause: Time to Connect, Learn, Think & Adapt’ at our friends space, headrooms (www.headroomsip.com).

With 20 participants from cross-sector and cross-industry organisations we facilitated a half-day event which was an interactive and participative exploration through circleindigo’s 5 key characteristics of resilience model (based on the research above). For each characteristic we ran a practical exercise designed to reinforce learning and extend competence and to get each participant to interact both with the model and one another: building resilience one characteristic at a time.

We had an enjoyable afternoon with our participants in the headrooms space, learnt lots and made new friends and connections, as did others. For more information on our Building Resilience work e-Mail us at info@circleindigo.com.

More than just sheep!

Ever open to exploring different ways unlocking new learning and insights we recently had the pleasure of facilitating an afternoon’s (2+ hours) team development activity with 1 corporate client, 2 groups of 12 people, 20 sheep, 2 shepherds and no sheep dogs!

We split the people into 2 groups and each had a shepherd and 10, one year old sheep that had never been herded before. The objective of the activity was for the 12 people to work as a team to herd 10 sheep in a (large!) field and get them in to a small pen, with little or no instruction form the shepherd! In the first sheep trial the groups were allowed to move the pen, and once this was ‘known’ the activity was pretty straight forward and successful, about 20-ish minutes to get all 10 sheep in to the pen. The second trial was a little more difficult, this time the pen had to be placed somewhere else in the field, this proved to be much more difficult and in fact after an hour and fifteen both groups had not achieved the task.

Now the shepherds came into their own, with a short instruction session, providing advice and answering questions, the groups were set a third trial, herd the sheep in to a pen, out in the field against the clock, 15 minutes! BUT following the instruction and advice the group Gary was working with at the time managed to get 8 out the 10 sheep in to the pen in 12 minutes, 2 sheep made a sly and last minute successful escape attempt, a massive achievement after trial 2!!!

And so to learning’s and application in the work place: someone has to be a shepherd, others have to be the ‘dog’: plan, communication, team work, belief in the task being achievable and commitment from all to the task at hand, and of course think outside the pen (box!).

It’s part of how we do things around here

We’ve just come back from running an in-house Facilitation Skills training programme as part of a week of skills and competency building for 250 staff for an international client. Alongside our programme were Project Management, marketing and client-relationship training session offerings: demonstrating that awareness is growing in organisations of the need to develop facilitation skills as a core skill across many roles alongside other more established core competencies.

Building participation in multi-stakeholder working

Recently we were asked to design and deliver a consultative workshop for a research organisation. The workshop was a multi stakeholder event and participants came from a broad range of backgrounds including health professionals, volunteers, service users, project managers and carers.
It was important to ensure the workshop was inclusive, accessible and engaging. It was also vital that the workshop process enabled everyone to feel they could contribute and that their opinions were heard and valued. We designed a workshop that began with an introductory activity that enabled ‘connection before content’ in order to create a safe space for the group to work in. Following on from this we used a number of methods throughout the day that covered different learning intelligence preferences including visual spatial, verbal linguistic and both intra and inter personal. This enabled greater levels of participation and engagement ensuring that everyone could contribute their ideas. For those of you who’ve trained with us you’ll be very familiar with this approach! For a useful resource to learn more about multiple intelligence theory visit http://www.multipleintelligencetheory.co.uk/

Gamestorming – by David Gray, Sunni Brown & James Macanufo

We’ve recently read and appreciated Gamestorming): The cover states it’s ‘A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers & change makers’.
This is a good toolbox type book of structured group processes, tools and techniques for group work, collaboration, innovation and problem solving. It’s nicely laid out, easy to read, understand and apply when working with groups. There are well over 50 different tools listed in this book, with a good explanation of each and how to apply them. It has several well-known ones like brain-writing, cover story, fishbowl and dot voting and lots of others I had heard of but not used, I shall definitely give some of them a go though!

O’Reilly Media. ISBN 13 – 978 - 6596804176

Welcoming unexpected workshop participants

Many of the people we train ask us about good ice-breakers and energisers. Justine recently experienced her most unusual one yet in the shape of a very affectionate and bouncy dog that stayed for the whole workshop. It wasn’t a stray that just came in from the street…one of our clients has a ‘bring your dogs to work’ scheme (it’s nothing against cats, just that cats tend to do their own thing…) and one of her participants did just that. Whilst the workshop treats and goodies (for the participants) had to be locked away our canine friend certainly added lots of good energy and laughter trying to use one of the large marker pens as a stick to be thrown and fetched and offering doggie woof insight at certain parts of the session. Perhaps not an appropriate energiser to be used on every occasion it certainly was a new workshop experience.

headrooms opening

On Tuesday 22nd February headrooms in Clerkenwell officially opened and circleindigo were pleased to be there to celebrate with their friends.
The people at headrooms are passionate about seeing people improve, create, innovate and do things better. They believe that people need stimulating environments hence they have created space in a great location offering a range of services from fully equipped meeting and training rooms, support from highly experienced management consultants, open development events in collaboration with People Tree and external support from facilitators including circleindigo as their best friends!

Establishing a Internal Facilitator Resource Pool

Over the past 2 years we have been working with a children’s charity to set up a sustainable internal facilitation resource. We initially delivered a two day core facilitation skills training programme to senior managers followed by a practice period where they had the opportunity to facilitate internal sessions using their new skills. Six months later we delivered a further two day high performance facilitation skills for this first cohort. Then followed a consultation period and over a time the facilitation team was firmly established and a process was agreed for developing more facilitators. It was decided that staff from across the organisation should be invited to apply to attend the next round of training stating their objectives and identifying their skills. Successful applicants then formed the 2nd cohort and they too went through both the core and high performance programmes.
This programme of work has had a positive impact on both individuals and the organisation and this February several members of the first cohort successfully completed their International Association of Facilitator’s Certification (see http://www.iaf-europe.eu/ and http://www.iaf-world.org/) .
The charity now has a professional internal resource that is being used regularly throughout the organisation. The outcomes organisationally include increased capability and capacity, effective and productive meetings and significant cost reductions.