 Hi, my name is Rebecca Courtney, a facilitation coach at AJ & Smart, and today I'm going to share with you our top 7 resources for workshop facilitators. We'll cover not only books, but also other tools that can help you take your facilitation skills to that next level. Just to let you know, some of these resources are free and ready to explore, while others you're going to need to pay a subscription for. By the way, we don't get any money for recommending these resources. These are just resources that we either really like or members of our community find very, very valuable. So here are our top 7 resources for facilitators in no particular order. First up, we have the book Game Storming, which was written by David Gray and his colleagues. So normally we have about five copies of this book in our office, but we just can't seem to find them. So our cameraman is going to do some really, really great editing and edit it into my hands. This amazing resource provides you with tons of games and activities that can be used during workshops to faster creativity, collaboration and innovation. Game Storming also has a really great website called GameStorming.com that you can check out. And I'm going to show you exactly how to navigate it here. You can see on the right hand side of this page, there's a list of categories that involves loads of different games, games for any meeting, games for closing meetings. And also just to let you know, they're saying games here, but what they actually mean is exercises or workshop activities. If you'd like to check out a game that we always use here at AJ & Smart, it's called Affinity Mapping. All you need to do is go into the search bar here, type in Affinity Mapping, and it will bring you straight to the page where it's going to explain everything you need to know about running the Affinity MAP activity. What this also breaks down for you really nicely is the object of play, so the purpose of this activity. It tells you how many players it's suitable for, it goes through the duration of play, and it also gives you a step-by-step clear instruction on how to play it. If you want to learn more about it, you can check it out on the website. Next up is the Workshop Tactics Cards, which is a collection of workshop activities and facilitation techniques that are going to help you design and deliver engaging, fun workshops. These were created by Charles Burdett, a designer and facilitator, with a passion for making workshops super fun. So, I'm going to show you them. What Charles Burdett managed to achieve with these cards is that he made them really cute. They're visually pleasing to the naked eye. They're color coded, which makes everything so much easier. There is super clear instructions on each card, which explains exactly how you would run a workshop activity. The way that it works is, we'll get rid of the instruction card first because we don't need that. The first card you're going to see, it's called the Workshop Strategy System. You're going to be using this all the time. There's a list of questions here that you're going to answer in order to figure out what sort of activities or exercises to run during your workshop. So, for example, the first question is asking you, do you clearly know what your team is working towards? If you answer yes, you can continue down to the next question. But if you answer no, look how exciting this is about to get. It says, go to the goals. It gives you a little emoji. No, it gives what is the call? It shows you a little icon called goals. What does that mean, you might ask? And it's red. So, you're going to go to the red section, which has a few different exercises that you can choose from. You decide which one is best for your team. I'm going to choose the sailboat. The sailboat is a great activity for any team trying to figure out what their goal is. On the front of this card, it's going to tell you that this exercise is going to take one hour. It's going to give you a brief description of what this exercise is. And on the back, it's going to take you through a step-by-step instruction on how to actually run this exercise. One final word for Charles. Charles, if you're listening, marry me. It's time to get serious right now. This next resource is one of life's unsolved mysteries. It's called Miro. Or is it called Miro? Nobody really knows. I'm manic. This is a digital whiteboard platform that we love to use for all our remote workshops. This tool has everything you're going to need to run a workshop remotely. It has features like sticky notes, pre-built templates, voting dots, timetimers. You can even play music on it with your participants to make the atmosphere nice. Let me take you straight to their website, which is called Miro.com, and let's check out some of their boards and templates. A really cool feature of Miro is they have a thing called Miroverse. You click in here, you're going to be brought to a page with loads and loads of templates that people have uploaded for you to use immediately. For example, if you're looking to run an LDJ, which is called a Lightning Decision Jam, it's a pre-made workshop recipe. You can click in here. As you can see, we have AJ and Smart's Lightning Decision Jam. Cool, eh? Press Use Template, and it brings you straight to a Miro board, which you can work from. It also has duplicated the template, which means that you can just work straight from this and it's not interfering with the template that's actually in the Miroverse. So if you zoom in, it shows you step-by-step how to use this workshop and how to run it. It shows you the warm-up section here. I'm just going to zoom in and just show you really briefly what that looks like. And then it shows you how to run the actual workshop. It's really easy to use and participants love working from these Miro boards. If you want to learn more about Miro or if you just want to figure out how to use it, you can check out our playlist here where we have a few videos that are going to take you through how to use Miro, not only as a facilitator, but also as a participant. Next up is The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures. This book is by Keith McCandless and Henry Lipmanowicz. I've definitely pronounced that wrong. This resource is a collection of 33 facilitation techniques that can be easily adapted to various workshop settings. So you can go through this book and learn about all the different techniques within this, but it does look a bit wordy. So if you'd like to explore it in a more simple, effective way, there's also a website called liberatingstructures.com. I'm going to bring you straight to that website now and show you exactly what it looks like. If you were expecting the website to look better than the book, you are going to be sorely disappointed because it looks exactly like the book. Henry and Keith, we absolutely love your resources and love your work, but please update your stuff. What I want to show you is the liberating structures menu, which compiles the 33 techniques that you will also find in the book. This is really, really great. You can just click on one of these techniques and it brings you to a description and a step-by-step guide on how to run this technique or how to use this technique in your workshops or your meetings. It gives you a detailed description on how to do it, why you need to use this technique and all the different tips and hints on using it within your workshops. Next up, we have Session Lab, which is an online platform for designing, organizing and sharing workshop plans and agendas. It has a library of over 500 facilitation methods and activities and it simplifies the process of planning and designing and engaging workshops, which can be a bit annoying. What I want to do is I want to show you their website, which is sessionlab.com. What I want to do is I want to show you a little overview of how to plan a one-day workshop. As you can see, I already have an icebreaker in here for five minutes and a session end. So what I need to do is I need to add more blocks. So I'm going to add a block and what I'm going to put into it is intro. I'm going to say start strong because it's one of our mantras here at AJ and SMART that we have to start every workshop on a strong note. So this is going to be my intro. I'm going to say that it's going to take me maybe 15 minutes and you can move this then to the very top. So let's add another exercise to this agenda. I'm going to add another block. I'm going to add... I'm going to search the library for a particular exercise called the sailboat because I think this is going to be perfect for my workshop. So you just type in sailboat, search and it will give you a sailboat in this column on the right. Really easy to do. You just click it and drag it over to your agenda and place it in. This is really great because if you press this button here, it's going to give you an overview of what the sailboat actually is and it's going to tell you the type of materials you need. It's going to give you examples on how to use it and it's also going to give you a step by step guide on how to run this activity. Something to also be aware of is in this library, not only do you have exercises, individual exercises, you also have full workshops to choose from. So for example, if I type in LDJ, once again, you will be brought to an entire workshop where it kind of gives you a broad overview of all the different exercises you need to run in this workshop. You will need to do a bit of work here yourself and figure out what sort of exercises need to go into this and build your agenda around that. Finally, if you want to start the session, a really cool feature on this is you press this, start away and it starts a timer, which helps you keep track of time throughout your workshop. So the next resource is called Fun Retrospectives, which is a book written by Paulo Caroli. It's also a website and it's called funretrospectives.com. The activities on this website are designed to be engaging, interactive and as the name suggests, fun, which helps create a more open and collaborative environment for teams to explore their successes and challenges. Let's dive straight into the website and I'm going to show you exactly how to use it. So here we are, have a look at how cute this is. Not only is this designed for just retrospectives, it's also a really great place to look for energizers, check-in activities, team-building activities. Yes, there's a number of things you can use for regular workshops or meetings. Here's a really great energizer or icebreaker called the roulette asks. This is going to take you through a step-by-step guide on how to actually run the activity. It's also going to give you advice for your remote team and also it's going to bring you to a link where the roulette is going to do its little thing and it's going to land on a question. Oh, if you were a Marvel hero, which one would you be and why? Ironman. Ironman? Why? Because he is intelligent and a billionaire. Nice, nice answer, like that. Okay, as you can see, this is a really, really great resource to quickly find energizers for your workshops or meetings. Last but not least is our very own free facilitation community called the Facilitator Club. This is a great space for you to meet life-minded people who are passionate about facilitation and workshopping. It's also a really great space to ask any question you have about facilitation and you're guaranteed to get really, really great answers back. What you're going to find in this community is people sharing resources, their knowledge, their expertise, but they're also going to use this space to share their successes and their challenges that they're facing in their workshopping and facilitation careers. So let me take you straight to the community and let's have a look. It's called facilitatorclub.com. It's a free community as I mentioned before and as you can see, there are some amazing discussions going on and if you've any question related to workshopping or facilitation, you can post your question in this community and you're going to get tons and tons of answers straight away. So for example, if you were running a workshop and you needed to find a really great icebreaker, all you need to do is type into the search bar and type in icebreaker. This is going to bring you to a few different posts on icebreakers. As you can see, I posted something a few weeks ago and I got 163 comments on this post and it's all about icebreakers. All of our members were contributing and letting us know they're top icebreakers. So what you can do is scan through some of these, pick your favorite and add them to your facilitation toolkit. Also, if you can't find what you're looking for, you can post your question into the community and you're guaranteed to get a few different members and also the staff here at AJ and SMART answering your questions. We know more than anyone that facilitation is still a very niche topic and you might feel that you're the only person doing it. So being a part of a community like this where you can exchange ideas, resources, challenges with other like-minded people is incredibly valuable. So make sure to join this club. It's a free community. The link is in the description below. So there you have it, our seven best resources for workshop facilitators. These resources are gonna help you level up your facilitation skills and create unforgettable workshop experiences. If you liked this video and if you wanna see more like this, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell for more. And let us know in the comments below which one of these resources you found the most helpful. Also, we'd love to hear your own favorite resource that we haven't mentioned here. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye. Hi, I'm Rebecca from AJ & SMART and I'm a facilitation coach here at AJ & SMART. I'm Rebecca from AJ & SMART. So here are our top seven resources for facilitators. First up, we have the game, Game Storming. Wait, what do we actually call it though here? Is it mirror or my row?