Best Practices and Insights for Facilitating Creativity, Alignment & Organizational Results

Education Elements is a company that serves K-12 schools seeking to implement blended learning solutions in the classroom. Looking for a way to get across the central concepts about blended learning that would help potential clients understand the approach, Education Elements turned to The Grove for a memorable way to illustrate them. Together, we developed a series of three custom graphic recording movies, each about five minutes long.

Each movie answers a central question: What is blended...

Author: David Sibbet

Becoming Aware of Metaphor

Using metaphor consciously is another skill involved in mastering facilitation. Humans make sense out of things by comparing what they know with what they don’t know. If the comparison says one thing “is” another thing, it qualifies as a metaphor. If I say it is “like” another thing, it qualities as an analogy. For instance, I could say that the Grove Facilitation Model™ is like a mental...

Author: David Sibbet

I want to reflect a little on why I think that personal development is essential to “mastery” in facilitation, and how we approach teaching about “mastery” at The Grove. We define facilitation as “the art of leading group process toward agreed-on outcomes with full participation, creativity, and ownership from all involved.” Facilitation is about serving the group and its collective purpose as distinguished...

Author: Rachel Smith

A few weeks ago, we put the following question to several facilitators’ groups on LinkedIn: What are the biggest roadblocks you’ve encountered during virtual or blended meetings? (We defined blended meetings as those where some participants are face-to-face and some are attending virtually.) In the lively discussions that followed the question, expert facilitators shared the issues they have encountered—as well as some tips for dealing with them. This...

It was while doing community development on farms in the Boland region of South Africa that Alinda Nortje, a former social worker with a statuesque frame, warm smile and wildly contagious energy, became deeply aware of the emotional baggage many people at the lower job levels in her country were carrying. Low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, lack of a personal vision and a feeling of hopelessness due to generations of social oppression were common. 

Nortje searched...