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    Strategic Play: The Creative Facilitator's Guide
    Strategic Play: The Creative Facilitator's Guide
    Strategic Play: The Creative Facilitator's Guide
    Ebook176 pages1 hour

    Strategic Play: The Creative Facilitator's Guide

    By Jacqueline Lloyd Smith and Denise Meyerson

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    About this ebook

    Jacqueline Lloyd Smith and Denise Meyerson collectively have over 50 years’ global experience in the design and delivery of incredible learning experiences for clients in the private and public sectors. They have partnered with top tier, medium size, and small corporate clients to produce events that rock. They are now opening their files to other facilitators, and educators—of all levels—to share tools and techniques they have personally tested and used.

    They are generously allowing you to benefit from their years of experience in the training, facilitation, and design space so you too are able to prepare, structure, and implement teachable moments, workshops, events, training days, learning experiences, offsites, and seminars that have a strong impact—and are memorable. Dip into this essential guide after you have been briefed by the executive team, managers, or human resource professionals and you are required to deliver a face-to-face session for anything between 1 and 100 hours. Play with these practical, user-friendly techniques to help your participants feel engaged and energized, so they will remember the key messages long after the event. Redesign and restructure the tools to suit your audience and the topic so the session remains vibrant and focused. Create experiences for any topic, whether for technical, personal, or professional development purposes.

    Not only do you have access to great openers and closers to activate thinking, we also provide you with a roadmap and overall layout so you have examples of how to structure your sessions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordzworth Publishing
    Release dateAug 21, 2015
    ISBN9781783240265
    Strategic Play: The Creative Facilitator's Guide

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      Book preview

      Strategic Play - Jacqueline Lloyd Smith

      1

      STRATEGICALLY ADD PLAY

      AND WATCH THE LIGHTS GO ON

      WHY ADD STRATEGIC PLAY?

      Let’s face it, people love to play and have fun. And everyone wants to be happy. We will often ask a room full of people, Who here has ever gone to a meeting, workshop, training, or offsite and left thinking ’That was a total waste of my time?’ You can imagine how many hands go up—almost all of them. When we ask, Who here woke up today and said, ’Yay! I get to go to that event,’ people usually laugh and it is rare to get a hand raise. If someone does raise their hand, it is usually the new guy in the back because this is his first one. And yet no one questions that we continue to afford wasting time, energy, or resources like this.

      Our lives seem to follow this linear track:

      Play when you are a baby and as a small child.

      Learn when you are a youth in school.

      Work when you are an adult.

      Reflect and play again when you retire.

      We want to help break this pattern as people begin to recognize we should all be lifelong learners and that we learn best when we play. We want to make this a circle, not a line. We can play to learn, apply the lessons to our work, and reflect at any iterative stage in the process. We can play and reflect, we can learn and reflect, and we can work and learn.

      Play is directly linked to decreasing stress levels. And when people play they allow themselves to take more risks. People need a break from taking themselves too seriously. They need to have fun and be happy. When we are happy we are closest to changing our minds and we are less likely to hang on to things.

      Research now indicates that designing playful activities into work can have far-reaching benefits. Employers will see an increase in retention and satisfaction, and communication will improve. Everyone’s minds will open to change, they will be more open to taking risks, and they will be more creative in solving problems. There are many areas and ways you can incorporate more play into your workplace.

      This book primarily addresses using play activities during working meetings, training programs, events, and offsites. but you can use these ideas almost anywhere you imagine they will fit. And the more you use these types of activities the more your participants and clients will ask for them and expect them; they will become part of your culture. When you begin to add play in applied and strategic ways, people begin to remember how much they love it and they long for more. If you, as a consultant, want your sessions to be in demand and to be invited back time and time again, start adding some fun to the work.

      To change the culture of your organization, strategically add some play. People are waiting for it!

      Five Step Essential Process:

      In all our applications where we are using purposeful play we make sure to follow five essential steps: It does not matter if you are building something out of LEGO® bricks or if you are making something with craft supplies. It is important that as a facilitator you follow these simple steps.

      These steps are the essential process used in art and play therapy, design thinking, and agile applications. If we ask someone to build, make, or create, we also need to hear their story. The storymaking and telling are needed for the debrief and the retrospective process. These are invaluable for innovation:

      The directive is given (by the facilitator, verbally, with visual clues)

      Building, making, creating (by the participant, a kinesthetic process)

      Giving and adding meaning (by the participants, internal/introverted process)

      Making and telling the story (by the participant, auditory, kinesthetic, and visual process)

      Reflecting on and incubating ideas and insights, answering questions from facilitators and others (both introverted and extroverted processes at conscious and subconscious levels)

      WHY IS THIS BOOK AN ESSENTIAL PART OF YOUR TOOLKIT?

      These activities are modern, refreshing, and easy to apply. They each have valuable applications for use within a program that aims to help people process information faster and transfer learning from working memory into long-term memory. They work well in a wide range of workshops, seminars, conferences, training programs, off-site events, and meetings. Always consider the context and use the essential openers and closers all the way through your session.

      Let us be clear. The session is CHUNKED into segments, and each segment opens and closes. The segment could link to a theme or topic area, or even to a key learning outcome. The opener sets the tone and the closer reviews and sums up that segment. You then move on to another opener, followed by some type of content you provide, and then you add a closer that summarizes or links to the next topic you are covering. In its simplest format, think of it as an opener at the start of the day and a closer before the morning break. Follow this with an opener as the participants reenter the room after break. Before lunch, introduce another closer before breaking or ending the day.

      Participants expect experiences that will engage and motivate them. They demand interaction and movement. After all, research strongly points to the advantages of embedding learning into long-term memory through learner-centered approaches. This book will help you design workshops that deliver.

      This book provides you with a repertoire you can adapt, recreate, and use in all sessions, regardless of the group’s size or requirements. We have used these openers and closers in sessions to address a variety of concerns:

      Induction or on-boarding programs had become tired and needed reinvention.

      Participants needed to ideate to discover new and better ways of doing things.

      Newly-formed teams were commencing a project or needed to be reinvigorated to improve performance levels.

      Implementation of formal learning programs for organizations.

      Improvement of programs delivered by universities and technical colleges.

      We have also used these in major conferences for large and small organizations and professional associations, as well as in offsite workshops for management teams or senior executives to plan strategy.

      This book is an essential part of the toolkit for:

      Facilitators, trainers, and Human Resource professionals who want to enhance their sessions and extend their range and engage participants.

      University and technical college lecturers, along with in-house learning and development professionals.

      Program designers who are briefed on creating sessions for internal and external clients.

      Conference speakers or organizers who want their events to be memorable.

      Organizational development professionals, managers, team leaders, and supervisors who want to align teams and departments.

      Great tips to follow for successful implementation:

      If an activity does not work out precisely as planned, continue with the session and confess this fact to the participants. You can still ask everyone

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