So, what would you do? When all your learning outcomes of an otherwise 4-hour program are achieved in the first 15 minutes of Ice-breaker itself?
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A couple weeks ago, I was set to deliver a 4-hour session on ‘Conflicts at Workplace’ for one of the nation’s finest #accounting and #auditing firms. Through facili-training, the aim was to create simulations that bring about natural behaviours and reactions, and then correlate those to their everyday work scene; followed by a reflection-based application.
Now while we had designed an elaborate session with 3 facilitation processes, little did I know what was to come! That’s the absolute beauty of Facilitation-based training interventions: you just never know!
To set context and as an ice-breaker, we started off with a simple activity- burst everyone’s balloons, whilst safeguarding your own.
Lo and behold!
The participants fully immersed themselves into the activity with child-like vigour. There was teasing, attacking, groupism, defence, strategy, and playfulness.
This ideally was to go on for about 10 minutes, but the facilitator in me arose and I let the play continue, as I stood there soaking it all in, and watching all the learning outcomes of the day get achieved. Midway, I then added two more layers to the activity, and lessened their play-area. After 35 minutes, we had two participants left with one balloon each intact, and the rest were on the sidelines in fits of laughter.
I was high-key so glad that I trusted my gut and didn’t contain the activity in 10 minutes, as we had a bucketful of observations and insights waiting to be tapped into.
We then spent the next 2 hours debriefing this process, which yielded so many insights, questions, reflections for the participants. Some even went on to discuss their triggers, pain-points and how they will now do things differently.
Obviously by this point the OG session plan was out of the window, and we spent some time on group-wisdom harvesting. Curated some Individual Action Plans (IAPs) for the participants to follow through, using ‘Stop/Start/ Continue’; and then we concluded with learning collation and feedback!
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See? That’s the difference between facili-training and experiential learning! All facili-trainings are experiential learning programs, while all experiential learning programs aren’t facili-training.
There’s a big difference!
It’s imperative to know when to use your facilitator hat and go fluid; and when to stick to your design. And the ability to hold space; to go with the flow without going tangent; to make them question and reflect; and to bring out the desired learning outcomes under any circumstances- that’s where the magic lies!
PS- no pictures due to client contracting.
All Birds With A Single Stone
