For many, meetings are viewed as a dreaded evil to be avoided at all costs: far too little gets accomplished, much of the discussion is unfocused and unproductive, and a lot of time is wasted. If you lead important group meetings, you know how difficult it can be to get a group engaged right from …

Developing strategy takes time and resources. It requires the time and commitment of some of the most highly paid and highly experienced people in your organization. So, if your team isn’t willing to invest what is needed, I recommend that you don’t do it. Poor planning is often worse than no planning at all. So, …

Do you have a boss that demands frequent and unnecessary reports or hovers over you to make sure you’re doing things “right” or requires you to wait for his approval on everything before you can move forward? Four out of five people, managers and workers alike, stated in a recent survey that have had mciro-manger …

A reader comment on my blog post last week sparked my thoughts on creative solutions. John reminded us of the Einstein quote about needing different thinking to solve a problem than the original thinking that created the problem. John suggested that we need to imagine solutions that are not yet visible, not yet embodied. Too …

A recent email posed the question: I am the Director of Philanthropy for a small nonprofit foundation. Our Board of Directors and committees are all comprised of physicians. I am beginning to build a lay component and am working on developing a Development Advisory Council – made up of lay members. I am looking to …

Steve Jobs once said: “I am as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” So also it should be for the social enterprise sector. There are plenty of great things that are not SEs. To gain credibility and traction in the marketplace, the SE field cannot be all things …

There are quite a lot of questions about how a document should be designed. If the document projects an appealing appearance and motivates the user to want to read it, then the document has been properly designed. But how do we do this? A lot of these questions can be answered within a Style Guide. …

Purpose of this Facilitation Blog Facilitation is guiding and supporting a group to clarify its purpose and goals, and how it can best work toward those. Facilitation has many applications, for example, strategic planning, team building, group problem solving and decision making, meeting management, Board meetings, conferences, focus groups and project planning. This blog helps …

I’m Michael Wilkinson and I’m the host of this blog. You can read more about me next to my picture in the sidebar. This blog will be about various aspects of facilitation, and will focus especially on practical tips and tools in posts, including posts from guest writers. You can learn more about this blog …

Michael Wilkinson is the Founder and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc. headquartered in Atlanta, GA, USA. He is the author of Amazon bestseller The Secrets of Facilitation, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, and The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy. Michael is a board member of the National Institute for Facilitation and founder of the …