Dynamic Facilitation is a facilitation approach addressing difficult or even complex issues. By taking notes on 4 flip charts the moderator supports the conversation and helps the group to make the shift towards a solution. (more…)
How to prepare memorable presentations? Simplify it and make it visual. Inspiring and memorable presentations are simple, clear and meaningful. While preparing have your audience in mind and make it visual and easy for them to follow. (more…)
Are you planning a face-face meeting to explore key issues and design action plans? The Open Space methodology would definitively be an option.
Read how the key elements of Open Space – the circle, the joint agenda setting, and the free discussion space – could create momentum to advance important issues. (more…)
Make your face-to-face meetings more learner-centered to foster stronger commitment and greater learning. Networks’ face-to-face meetings are a great opportunities for learning. What does it need to make it a learning happening? How do adults learn? What are the key ingredients to be taken into account already at the planning stage? (more…)
Are you at the point to start planning for your next face-to-face workshop, seminar or learning event of your network? Kick-start your planning with a short checklist to gear up your learning event. (more…)
The next week’s NeuroLeadership Summet in New-York. A brain friendly f2f meeting. (more…)
How many topics should a face-to-face meeting put on the agenda? The participants of the SDC Health network explored during their 2nd face-to-face meeting one topic: Health Promotion. With this decision for one key discussion topic the meeting had a clear focus; this allowed for in-depth discussions.
During the 2nd day of its face to face the SDC network Migration and Development left the meeting room to visit activities in relation to migration in Dhaka. This blog post outlines why and how the “dive” into the context and confrontation with different perspectives can accelerate and nurture the network’s conversation (deliberations, dialogue). (more…)
E-collaboration has been around since computer networks were invented, but of course our increasing interconnectedness presents more opportunities for us to do it, and to do so with a greater variety of tools. What is e-collaboration? A brief way to describe it is working together to produce something (a document, a position, a decision) using electronic media. It is easy to get lost among the tools, but successful e-collaboration is much more about the people who are involved and how their interaction is facilitated, than it is about the technologies used. (more…)
For her third blog post on the good practice guides to managing and supporting networks, Nara Weigel collected reactions on the guide Roles and Responsibilities within Networks. In a nutshell, the guide examines why roles are important to consider in the context of SDC networks and describes what main roles and responsibilities have developed within these networks. Without going in to the specificities of each SDC network, it tries to outline key elements for ensuring good collaboration within a network. (more…)
By Nara Weigel
In her first blog post A Treasure of SDC Experiences in Managing and Supporting Networks: 7 Guides to Make it your Own, Nara Weigel presented the interlinked good practice guides available on the website of the Learning and Networking Division. This blog post, explores two of the guides in more detail: nurturing networks and managing the membership of SDC networks. Two users of the guides share their first reactions, personal reflections and further lessons from their daily work as network focal point and backstopper. (more…)
by Bertha Camacho and Adrian Gnägi
Solution Exchange pioneered a structured way to conduct e-discussions, called “e-discussion campaigns with consolidated replies”. The structure of those e-discussions looks like this:
This post reflects on the first “e-discussion campaign with consolidated replies” conducted by SDC’s “decentralization and local governance” network (dlgn) (more…)
In the first part of this blog I looked at e-faciliation and how it compares to face to face facilitation. For this second part I asked myself, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the online situation and what would be the content of a twenty minutes crash-course on “the specifics of online facilitaiton”. And as a round-up of both blog posts on e-facilitaiton I share my thoughts on the future prospects of facilitation in cyberspace. (more…)
By Olivia Hartmann, AGRIDEA
The e-factor is omnipresent in the West and increasingly also in other parts of the world. It has become difficult to imagine a life without it.
BUT – the e-factor in facilitation is actually a rather recent development.
A look at a young skill and how to skillfully use it for learning and exchange - Part I.
Looking at the history of the development of communication means I came to realize what a recent development the internet and with that e-facilitation actually is! E-Facilitation - the art of sucessfully planning and guiding online interactions of various kinds and with a wide variety of purposes – has existed for barely 15 years. (more…)
By Tobias Sommer
Communities of practice in their traditional definition are every manager’s dream: on individual initiative, experts form informal communities out of pure interest in a subject to exchange their experiences, talk about new challenges and learn from each other, pushing their field forward and developing new solutions. Ideally, all of this would happen alongside normal work, stay out of organisational structures and employment agreements, costing the company not time nor money nor energy – sort of a holy grail of knowledge management.
Sadly, as with anything that seems too good to be true, this hasn’t worked for a long time. In many organisations and companies, informal networks have lost their drive for several reasons, (more…)
In this visually stunning animation video, Steven Johnson reflects on where ideas com from and in what environments they are stimulated or restrained.
found via aidontheedge.info.
(more…)
By Tobias Sommer
Good governance is one of the keys to contemporary development cooperation: It is considered the magic solution that allows developing countries to make the big step ahead. It sounds simple—yet it is obviously complicated to achieve. It needs the political will to promote good governance through possibly far-reaching reform, the knowledge about how to do it, and especially that governments learn from their own or others’ experiences. Just providing information and instructions to governments does not suffice for this: They also have to transform the acquired knowledge into action. Unfortunately, this crucial transformation process is far from understood. After all, a government, with its complex composition of actors and political environment, cannot be expected to learn and behave like an individual or an ordinary organization.
In the recent World Bank publication The Black Box of Governmental Learning (Executive Summary PDF), Raoul Blindenbacher1 (in collaboration with Bidjan Nashat) sheds some light on this question. I had the opportunity to talk to Raoul Blindenbacher (RB) and get some answers to questions that had emerged while I was reading his book. (more…)
By Michèle Marin
By now, a series of the SDC networks have come up with their first international f2f meetings. Their experiences reveal a few recurrent lessons to be learned, and trigger questions on how to best manage a f2f event. The SDC Learning & Networking team reflects upon them in a loose series of blog posts. This second post considers implications of the 1/3 principle (cf. post I, Sept.8) on planning a f2f, and explores concepts suitable to meet upcoming participants’ needs during a meeting. (more…)
HIGHLIGHT
By the end of 2009 and after 40 years, SDC closed down its bilateral cooperation programme in Ecuador. The phasing-out started in 2006. The closure was planned “to be responsible, creative, and required the multiplication of successful effects and the highest levels of impact and sustainability. The capitalisation of the Ecuadorian experience has been considered as a primary objective within the Knowledge Mangement plan and the communication strategy.” You find the SDC Ecuador phasing out portal (in spanish). The virtual library includes an english Summary report “Local actors: The true Protagonists of their own Development”. (more…)
Why should you bother for participatory methodologies in f2f meetings of networks, if frontal plenary sessions seem to be so much easier to organise? The value added does not only concern the atmosphere and output of a f2f meeting itself, but also the way network-members will collaborate virtually beyond the meeting.
Riff Fullan, knowledge coordinator at Helvetas, shares with us his reflections on the Helvetas experience in network facilitation. (more…)
By Adrian Gnägi
This is the first post in a series focusing on network face-to-face events.
In October 2008 SDC changed its organizational structure: the former geographical/thematic matrix structure was changed into a single line operational structure. Thematic networks were created to exchange and capitalize experience. Until May 2010, 4 of the new networks had held their first face-to-face (f2f) meeting. This post sketches 6 issues which merit reflection when preparing and planning for future f2f events:
