The Art of Facilitation — Part I

How do you train the trainers? Not an easy feat.

One month from now, Design Thinking Montreal will be running its one-day Human Centric Design Workshop. And behind the scenes, participants from the Leadership+ program are already preparing.

The first part of the meeting was spent exploring each leader’s motivation for sharing their knowledge on Human Centric Design with community members.

The insights were so diverse and interesting we thought of including them in the opening of our workshop next month.

We then let leaders create three learning circles based on their interests. Each circle will explore a particular theme, based on the Ideo.org material for Facilitators:

• Introduction to HCD, Inspiration and Challenge
• Field Research
• Ideation & Prototyping

Leaders seldom have the chance of enjoying their own event as participants. This is why today was a very special moment — each group got to explore their own material with the eyes of a participant. This experience will help in relating to the audience and connecting to the material.

Each in their own learning circle, the facilitators went over the PPT presentation and discussed :

• What caught their attention
• What would resonate with audiences
• What they would like to investigate further

We even had a little surprise : our hosts’ boyfriend had secretly taken some candid pictures which he posted on Twitter to share!

For the teams to continue working remotely, each team created a temporary channel (which will be deleted once the event is over). This allows asynchroneous work to reduce the numbers of meetings needed to prep.