Travel Sketchnotes | A Facilitation Journal

In the past 2 years I co-facilitated 5 face 2 face community gatherings. Each one was designed with a specific intention and flavour responsive to the people coming together and the space in which we gathered. These sketchnotes synthetize the flow of the gathering, the intention of the workshops and the tools used to facilitate. Accompanying the drawing is a reflection, post gathering, of things that I would like to do more of and things that I want to do less of next time around.

Imagining like a designer

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• Drawing out ideas. Stick figures as a collaboration language.
• Playing with Legos. Joy enabling focus.
• Sharing our personal stories.
• Barefoot workshops. Professional dress code is overvalued (and overpriced).
• Sharing snacks from our countries.
• Individual reflection.
• Visiting the market together. Respecting the need for rest and exploration as much as family, work & religion.
• Planning next steps together.
• Creating in nature.
• Face 2 face iteration.
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LESS…

• Days of 10 to 12 hours of work. It's not sustainable to facilitate a 8 hour day and on top of that 4 hours of debrief and plan for next day.
• Staying inside the venue for the whole retreat week.
• Drawing back from facilitating disagreement.
• Undervaluing the contributions I've made to Reimagine Peace.
• Slacking of documenting the process (taking pictures will bring back memories)
• Feeling  undeserving of good feedback.
• Filling silences too fast
• Missing out on participating to prepare for what's next.

Connecting as a community

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• Analog meetings. Making the most of time without screens, while we can! Looking at ourselves. Eye to eye, hand by hand.
• Time & space to reflect back to the group what I’m hearing/reading as a facilitator.
• Choice in participation. Offering alternative simple ways of participating.
• What if? feedback loops.
• Making our own coffee.
• Designing tools that allow to experiment with ways of relating, before entering into difficult or complex conversations.
• Exploring imagination practices (iterate on them.)
• Space for emergent facilitation.
• Warming up to difficult conversations with lowstakes topics.
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LESS…

• Meditation sessions after lunch.
• Crossing the boundaries of my personal capacity. Isolating as a facilitation team to prepare for following sessions.
• Overplanning. Arriving exhausted to facilitate is counter productive.
• Sense-making about the sessions/day alone as a facilitation team.
• Going back to the same topic trying to find the perfect solution.
• Shame for not being able to replicate the experience for those that can’t make it to the gathering.
• Silencing my voice. (ground myself, name my power & share my perspective.)
• Feeling like all the responsibility of the quality of participation sits in the facilitator team.
• Fitting too many sessions in a day. (We need time for reflecting on the process, on how we felt and what we learned, and what do we see happening next, as a group.)
• Stretching activities when the room is not responding to it.
• Going on an imagination journey and staying there.(transition from imagination to today and then go back into the future)

Co-creating a proposal

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• Active appreciation.
• Treasure hunts. Bringing together key topics to tackle with the experience of the place that welcomes us.
• Honest conversations. While in hamman, over dinner& at the working space.
• Documenting learnings and reflections together at the venue.
• Deeper work with smaller groups.
• Visual facilitation.
• Designing and testing out tools to make sense of concepts.
• Sharing facilitation with the group.
• Imagining plural ways of decision making.

LESS…

• Artificial urgency.
• Activities in the agenda. Sessions per day.
• Talking using only our voices. (we can bring in others’ voices and then make proposals using our power & priviledge to mitigate for power & priviledge.)
• Mixing intentions in a single session. (sharing understanding, exploring and taking decisions require different ways of engaging)
• Expecting that a face 2 face session is the place to create final deliverables.

Collective leadership & experimentation

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• Emergent facilitation. Connection with the group translates to connection to intuition and results in creativity.
• Shared principles.
• Collective facilitation. Clarify facilitation principles & roles, and create space for people to bring individual styles.
• Visual tools and cultural props for facilitation.
• Storytelling.
• Agreements that speak to the characteristics of the space and the values of the group.
• Valuing the power of design, creativity and imagination for being in community.
• Naming intentions. Sharing my perspective as a facilitator.
• Facilitating creating proposals in smaller groups.
• Poetry in facilitation.
• Visually documenting collective decisions.

LESS…

• Implementing methods without grounding them on the experience and culture of the group.
• Defined rigid rules.
• Performing a role defined by a methodology, without time to ground it and interpret it through my values and using my skills.
• Experimenting new methods with high stakes decisions (try it out first with a simple topic so everyone understands the dynamic and the rationale behind it)
• Ignoring the elephants in the room. (create space for them in the agenda, even if you don’t see them)
• Guilt for not being able to give everyone in the group the experience they want.
• Bringing in creative tools disarticulated from the whole gathering and intention.
• Prioritizing other’s “right to comfort”. Not saying whenI’m not feeling safe to avoid friction.
• Letting go of intention out of exhaustion.
• Asking triggering questions without the time to hold them with care. (simulate taking complex decisions with examples)

Co-creating a governance proposal

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• Naming the power dynamics present in facilitation and in self-facilitation.
• Creating shared understanding and collective sense making.
• Space for individual reflection before entering into collective ideation.
• Facilitating for balancing participation in a group.
• Creating options, to clarify assumptions, inspire each other, and shape a fuller picture.
• Define expectations and articulating intentions as a group to be able to better prioritize.
• Shared sense making.
• Fractals

LESS…

• Taking decisions without clearly documenting them.
• Diminishing my facilitation approach because it is not prescrictive.
• Allowing silence to consider that the first idea is the “right” one.
• Agreeing to things that I don’t believe in to avoid tension. (get better at naming the disagreement even if moving forward with the proposal)
• Generic agreement that seems like a decision made but is not clearly stated.
• Leaving documentation for the end of the gathering.

We do, we learn, we iterate. 🌀