Here’s a sustainability solution! (hat tip to Guy Kawasaki) With 3 young boys in our house, our clothes get grubby, dirty and covered in food all day, everyday! Here’s a revolutionary new system to wash clothes … a virtually waterless washing machine! With our place about to switch to water tanks … I want to rent one! Rent a washing machine? Yep! I think we need to move away from buying products that we can afford (features = inefficient and short lived) and lease or rent products that would be way too expensive to purchase (features = super efficient and …

I have facilitated 6 workshops since returning from Byron Bay. 5 moved forward to a place of possibility … 1 ended up where it started. Why?  5 focused on solutions not problems … participants expressed things visually rather than using language … conversations were about the future and didn’t dwell on the past 1 chose to tackle the problems … participants got stuck with words and sentences … the future was took hard to see through all the problems … it felt downward spiraling This picture sums it up for me … Geoff 

As facilitators, we know how powerful a group discussion on ‘assumptions’ can be. In my experience, it helps groups/people to understand each other’s perspectives … and move through Sam Kaner’s “Groan Zone”. I like to shine a light on assumptions with an activity that is both fun and active. I use ‘Activity IX’ when groups begin to struggle … fall asleep … or when it simply ‘feels right’ to throw out there. By the way, it always works and the subsequent group discussion is entirely unpredictable … so ‘let go’ of where you think it might end up. Here it is … Activity IX …

A client of mine just sent me an email and wrote … “Some of the research on the history of Bell Post Hill seems to show how important the local churches were for meeting up with people and discussing community issues – we’ve kind of lost that ‘3rd place’ between work and home to catch up with our neighbours I suppose.” Without thinking too much I replied … “Maybe we have lost some of those “spaces” … and maybe that’s the space that Web 2.0 is re creating, in an  artificial and somehow very real kind of way!? At the …