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Brief Encounters is being turned into a ready-to-use packs of cards on the topics of Success, Communications, Teamwork, Leadership. If you would like to be the first to know when these (and other titles) are ready, sign up to receive my Active Reviewing Tips newsletter - tips for facilitators who like making learning active. | |
Bryan
writes ... Brief Encounters was brilliant ... It seems to work best when you ambush people with cards as they enter the meeting area for the first time. Bryan Gladstone IdeaSmiths Consulting Partnership |
Tina
writes ... I used your success exercise with much success - it really got an organisation going as an icebreaker in a positive creative tempo for the whole day - very timely and appropriate. Tina Cook People and Organisational Development |
Jeppe writes... I've used the brief encounters exercise more than a couple of times .... Always creates great succes in different settings. My experience is that the crucial thing is the introduction and the way it is conducted from the facilitator - once it's fairly clear how it works people always get sucked into the conversation. I have had good experience with background music - particularly something that establishes an underlying yet discrete pulse. Here's some questions I came up with and that proved to work well:
performer and interaction artist CSI Live www.kollaboration.biz |
Nina writes... I had literally 15 minutes to come up with a warm up for my staff that has been stressed out for weeks on a seasonal project. I searched the web for 1 minute, found this website and in 10 minutes made up the cards for Brief Encounters. It was a wonderful warm up, the staff become relaxed and positive and all said they really liked it. Thank you! After our success, I came back to the website, read all the warm ups and I am very impressed at how they each afforded experiences for learning about each other and gave insight to the work. I found most interesting those that include children and adults. Nina Laboy Director City of Seattle Seattle Youth Employment Program |
'Brief Encounters' - an icebreaker for sharing successPurpose: to get to know others while learning about their experiences of success. Briefing: The briefing is on the cards that you give out. One side of each card has the standard briefing. The other side has two unique questions about success (or any topic you want to focus on). Comment: This is an excellent way to start an event where people are arriving at different times, but it can be introduced at any point. My own collection of questions brings out people's strengths and their humour and focuses attention on the theme of the day (which in this case is 'success'). Everything you want from an icebreaker! |
BRIEF
ENCOUNTERS
The
purpose of this exercise is to meet everyone
and to hear about their experiences of success. Be kind: adapt or change your question if your partner is struggling to answer it. |
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Acknowledgement:
'Brief Encounters' is based on an ice-breaker introduced to me by Jim
Cain, co-author of Teamwork and Teamplay. In Jim's version the starting point is a central briefing where everyone has a blank card and writes down their own question. The 'Brief Encounters' version is self-running - people can collect their cards as they arrive and enter the room. With the briefing on each card, there is no need for a central briefing. If you want to know more about Jim's book this link will take you straight to the book at amazon.com: Teamwork & Teamplay Icebreakers on this site
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Sharing Success - Use stories about training successes to engage key stakeholdersFeasting on Achievement is an article from Cal Wick and Michael Papay (Fort Hill Company) which describes a range of ways in which the creation and sharing of success stories can add impact to training. It is not simply a restatement of the value of spreading good stories: it also creatively considers the range of good stories worth spreading. For example, encouraging course participants to write about good ways in which their managers have supported them after training - which helps to alert other managers to what they could be doing. They also use some smart 'crowdsourcing' software which seems to add visibility to the best stories (a bit like Amazon reviews work). The software is We Achieve: "Imagine if you could make achievements contagious in your organization". |
Development Means Sharing HappinessHere
are some inspiring extracts from
an article about rural and community development
using Participatory
Rural Appraisal PRA - a philosophy and a toolkit that shares much
common ground
with active and creative reviewing.
These
extracts
are presented here with kind permission of
the author, Kamal Phuyal, Nepal. You can find the full
article at http://www.scn.org/cmp/modules/par-phu.htm
Once
one of my colleagues told me that, ''You
know,
what does development mean? In my experience, it is mainly sharing
happiness
with others.'' He
explained, with various cases he had
experienced, and
I liked his idea of development.
The
women explained about their project during our
sharing:
We
came to know that her only motto was to share
happiness with other people.
Both villagers and Didi
shared their
happiness. The drinking water project was the means for them to share
happiness.
And, that happiness brought that project into success... During the
whole
evaluation period, they recalled their happiness repeatedly. That
happiness
encouraged them to do many other things. Now they have their own
co-operative,
they have formed a maintenance committee among the women. They have
saving
groups. ''We are happy to be in a group and we come there, we share our
problems
and in fact we can share our happiness there,'' they said.
It
has been through this process that I have learnt from the
experiences I have had so far that PRA helps us to share our happiness
with the
villagers as well as their happiness with us, and of course especially
with
those who are vulnerable and marginalized.
I
believe that
reflecting on the positive aspects (of anything) can help us to go
forward for
development. Reflecting only on the negative aspects encloses
us; we
cannot go forward through concentrating on the negative alone.
Kamal
Phuyal
Nepal You
can read the complete original article at http://www.scn.org/cmp/modules/par-phu.htm
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Happiness Quotes"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." Mahatma Gandhi"A human being is happiest and most successful when dedicated to a cause outside his own individual, selfish satisfaction." Benjamin Spock Happiness Research
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