Recently I was asked to moderate a panel at the Bay Area Open Space Council's annual conference on collaborative leadership.

Why the interest in collaboration and how to lead collaborative efforts? Simply put, there is just not much that the individual heroic leader can do anymore. Perhaps there never was. In order to create progress in our complex world, all leaders are challenged to manage teams and partners in an ecosystem of relationships. Read More...

The challenge of our time is to find profoundly creative ways to address global social, political, and environmental breakdown. Both organizations and communities are challenged to redefine themselves and their practices in light of an increasingly unpredictable and in many cases more dangerous environment. Read More...

As facilitators we need to be aware of new ways to effectively bring groups together, both when we work with them in a meeting room and when they are spread out across the globe. Web 2.0 tools are much more than the latest Internet buzzword. They reflect a set of attitudes captured in software that very closely match the core values of most facilitators. For example, facilitators are very concerned with accurately capturing the input of all participants. Web 2.0 supports this by creating tools that allow participants to co-create powerful information stores on their own, with only facilitative guidelines. Wikipedia is the pre-eminent example of this. Creating meaning from information is one of the core tasks of groups, tools like "tagging", applying definitional words to articles, pictures, just about anything, creates a folksonomy that can accurately capture themes a group identifies. Read More...

What can we learn from trying to get over 5000 people talking about how to change something as big and complex as the world food system? It turns out quite a bit! Here are some take-aways from my week in Turnio, Italy as a moderator for Terra Madre 2006. Read More...

This week I am working as a moderator at Terra Madre an international conference on food system change sponsored by Slow Food International. This gathering of over 6000 food producers, chefs, and food activists has two primary goals: to create a rich exchange of information between people who normally do not get a chance to collaborate and to build a powerful network of people and organizations to promote Slow Food. Read More...

Facilitators often recommend creating a set of ground rules to help a group function well together. These rules can help set the boundaries for decorum (as in cell phones on silent) or for exchange (as in no interrupting). The list of ground rules can often be quite long as the facilitator and the group attempt to cover all the ways a meeting can go wrong.

I have found that another approach works well and in most groups is all that is needed. Typically a group can function well with four simple rules: Read More...

Many of us have been in meetings where a visual record of the comments made by participants were captured by the facilitator or recorder. There are two important reasons to record: the first is help the group complete its task effectively by keeping track of its ideas and agreements. The second is to keep the process of the group working smoothly by assuring all voices are heard. Recording comments is a way to show participants you have heard what they said.

Anyone can be a good recorder by following a few simple guidelines: Read More...

One of the most common mistakes I see in meetings is not paying sufficient attention to how the meeting begins.

The opening of a meeting sets the tone. Start late, have a fuzzy agenda, allow one speaker to dominate and soon you will have a restive and distracted crowd ready to complain about another wasted meeting.

Here are some helpful tips on how to get your meeting off to a great start: Read More...