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We proudly announce!

Audience Response Facilitation Workshop

The Audience Response Facilitation Workshop is an introduction to using two powerful interactive tools: The Hive and Turning Technologies Clickers, The workshop will provide you with a working knowledge of how to use each of these tools in meetings, training workshops, and town halls. It includes a set of practical interactive exercises that will enable you to collect instant and anonymous feedback from participants and process this data in the moment. You will be able to create your own designs for collecting information within a PowerPoint presentation or using the Internet suite of tools contained in The Hive. By gaining a detailed understanding of how you operate and troubleshoot each of these unique tools, you will gain the confidence you need to facilitate audience response sessions immediately following the workshop.

The aim of this course is to maximize your ability to apply this learning to your facilitation and training work. The workshop contains three core elements:

Principles – for creating and applying audience response sessions for your work.

Theory – a simple framework for understanding the best practices in applying Audience Response solutions in your work.

Practice – experiences to help you align your thinking, understanding, and actions.

The Audience Response Facilitation Workshop provides the awareness, the basic tools, and the practical experience to help you achieve success in building Audience Response seamlessly into your own meetings, workshops, and training sessions. Audience Response solutions can be used to address numerous organizational issues including strategy alignment, teamwork, leadership, conflict resolution, career planning, and customer service.

Outcomes

As a result of the workshop, participants will be able to:

•  Design Audience Response sessions into meetings of all sizes
•  Understand the best uses for Audience Response solutions
•  Set up the technology easily and quickly
•  Trouble shoot technology issues in the moment
•  Collect data instantly and anonymously
•  Publish group data and help the audience to understand it

And participants report they are more:

•  confident in applying Audience Response Solutions
•  able to engage participants as active learners
•  able to measure workshop results
•  willing to experiment further with Audience Response in the moment

Who Is It For?

The Audience Response Facilitation Workshop is for Trainers, Facilitators, and HR leaders who want to create highly interactive sessions and workshops for employees and customers.

Completion of this workshop includes shadow consulting from our team to insure your first solo flight into Audience Response is a successful one.

The workshop is three days in length, followed by a remote clinic (scheduled separately) where participants share their learning and experience from actually facilitating their first Audience Response meetings.

The Hive is an internet based suite of tools used for brainstorming, surveys, creating electronic agendas, prioritizing work, project management, sharing documents, and more. It can be used for face–to–face meetings, remote meetings, town halls, etc. The Hive is a hosted solution licensed by the client.

Turning Technologies Clickers are instant polling devices most often used within PowerPoint Presentations for enabling instant feedback from participants.

Each of the above solutions can stand-alone or be used together. Together they provide a unique and powerful turnkey solution to creating interactive and engaging audience response sessions.

We are happy to answer any questions about this workshop and run a short demonstration for you of these powerful technologies. Please call Robert McNeil at (610) 469-3130 or email – rob@robertmcneil.com

"A Clicker Moment"

Discovery is a wonderful experience. It can be exhilarating when it happens on the spot at your next meeting, project review, town hall or Senior Leadership Meeting. We like to use Turning Technologies Clickers to help us in these wonderful moments. Here is an example. I was facilitating a very important senior level meeting for a Global Retail Business. The group proposed eight priorities for the next budget year. In a flash, it became apparent that eight could not be accomplished or afforded. So, what do you do?  You have a “clicker moment.” Write down the eight items sequentially, and ask the group to pick the most important of the eight. Click away.

When we did this, two things happened. Far and away, one of the priorities outweighed all of the others. However, another interesting thing occurred. Four of the eight received no votes. We were able to table these, and then focus on the remaining three. Within five minutes, with virtually no conflict, posturing, or stalling, we got to the core issues. We then could have a robust debate about which would be included, how much time and energy we should apply to them, and most important, who on the team was brining each of these home for us.

The best part, is that there is no set up. Use Turning Technologies, Turing Point Anywhere. Plug the device into your computer, and you are ready to go. Ask away and have the group click their response. Afterwards you can go back in and write down the actual question. It’s easy, fast, and inexpensive. Who said you could only pick two? With the extra time go gain from this, play a round of golf on me.

Going Deep with Clickers (supportive confrontation)

A number of times, I use clickers with with The Hive to achieve a fast feedback system that I cannot get with a single application. Clickers allow us to vote quickly on any topic and they make collecting critical pieces of data easy and fun. Let me give an example of going deep with them.

Suppose your client, a large team of 30, wants to increase trust, and suppose further that they already know they have a number of issues that need to be worked, but are unwilling to discuss them openly. It’s a very common problem.

One way to get at what needs to be worked is to use clickers with a bit of Action Research. Here’s our method. Kids, don’t try this at home without a real facilitator present.

Identify the working sub-teams of the large team. For example in a large financial team you might have these subgroups. IT, Treasury, HR, Tax, Finance, and ER (enterprise risk).

Make the following table:

Notice that each of the intersections can describe the relationship between each of the sub teams. The interaction of HR Enterprise Risk and Tax offers two dimensions Critical and Compatible. The questions would be: How CRITICAL is it for Enterprise Risk and Tax to work well together on this team. We could score this by means of a 1-7 Likert scale, where 1 - not critical and all and 7 means essential for the well being of the team.

Next we could measure how COMPATIBLE they are in practice. How well do they actually get along.? Get along has the connotation of trust in action.

Now, what’s interesting is that everyone on the team knows everything about these dimensions for each of the combinations. They have not had an easy way to see it, or to discuss this openly. When you load this into the clickers, you have a powerful design that in the capturing of the information and in ensuing discussion.

The clickers capture the information instantly and anonymously. It take about 10 minutes to collect all the data. The discussion is rich, and can lead to significant breakthroughs. For example there may be hot spots in the team where Critical is scored high, and Compatibility is scored low. This is worth discussing. There may also be places where a sub team flat lines, that is they are not seen as critical even though they feel they are. Again, this is worth discussing.

Clickers can add a new dimension to your consulting work. Action Research in the moment. Can’t help to think that Kurt Lewin would have loved to play with these in action!

Giving Credit: I learned this technique from Will Schutz a long time ago. He was a genius at designing powerful, supportive confrontations that move groups to productive dialogue.