My favourite coaching tools: Graphical Facilitation - Bikablo

Caveats:
None. Being capable of bringing life to notes by drawing, infographic creating or just simple graphically facilitation of ideas and information for self or groups is extremely valuable! Only, balance time drawing with time facilitating or engaging with the group members to ensure there is growth of the shared knowledge space. Some group members may find watching someone drawing for too long distracting. (this is feedback from a paired training session where my colleague was training whilst 1 was in the background capturing and marking up what he was saying)

I can't draw well. As someone said - with writing, or speaking, we're given a lot of feedback, and even though we may be poor writers or speakers we have to do it. Not so with drawing. We are born with the ability to make marks on things. Because of poor feedback at early age typically, those without strong urge or ability, usually make a conscious decision somewhere to not draw anymore.

But these days, where nearly everything is group/team work, the ability to draw "good enough" is becoming a really key and useful ability to have.

And then I found Bikablo - or rather a colleague of mine told me about it. And then suddenly I could (and still can) draw some the patterns I find most useful for the work that I do.

Required:

The Bikablo book: http://www.neuland.com/DE/facilitation-tools-jc4rdwszaiw/bikablo-6s5uy80465f.html (in German/English) which is also sometimes available from amazon here
A set of thin+thick coloured markers as per Bikablo recommendation - I prefer the Artline ones which are usable on whiteboards as well as being comfortable on flipchart paper!

Some/lots of time to practice beforehand!

Step 1: Practice, and then practice some more. Pick just a handful of useful basic shapes and 2-3 colour pair combinations that you like

Step 2: Slowly bring them into your sessions and grow confidence that you can draw, and you can draw well enough so that people actually praise your work/talent!

Step 3: Within a couple of sessions over the time of a few weeks or months, you'll be drawing extremely high quality session outputs that people will be asking to keep for themselves. Success!

Step 4: Always take photos of all your facilitated graphics and be sure to get them back to the group as soon as possible after the session! Done well, you will not need to type them up! Win!!

My favourite coaching tools: 2 Axes Visual Shift Chart

Caveats:
None. Usually used with groups, but can be used for individual as well.

Required:
Piece of paper - usually A3
A different colour marker for each measurement point (at least start and end will be required)

Optional:
The neater you set things up, the better the result will look.
Eg, use a ruler for drawing the axes, reserve the black marker for the axes, draw a neat legend, etc

Step 1: Place the sheet in landscape

Step 2: Draw straight vertical and horizontal axes along the left and bottom sides.

I place the "feeling" axis as the vertical as it is useful to visualise whether a vertical shift up or down was happier/sadder, more enthusiastic/less enthusiastic.

I place the "knowledge" axis along the horizontal as there is less emotional expression required for knowledge.

In the example, which I used for Agile Awareness training purposes, the axis on the left is "Agile Enthusiasm" and on the bottom is "Agile Knowledge"

Step 3: Pick 4-5 indicators for each axis. It is sometimes very useful, depending on what you are measuring, to ensure there is no obvious "average"/"middle of the road" indicator in order to subtly influence people to make a decision on where they are, which helps for self-enforced consistency during training and afterwards also (see Robert Cialdini's Influence).

In the example I've used:
- Agile Enthusiasm: Terrorist, Unsure, Apprentice, Master, Apostle
- Agile Knowledge: None, Some, Lots, Expert


Before beginning the session, select 1 colour marker, and ask the group members to indicate where they are on axes. Sometimes initials are useful to help them remember where they placed their "X".

Sometimes, for some issues where I use the "2 Axes Visual Shift Chart" an anonymous "X" is better - eg helping a team go through Tuckman's Mourning / Adjourning Phase when someone has abruptly left the team.

Step 5: Conduct the training, facilitatory event or retrospective. If it is a multi-day event, decide if you want/need to reflect on shifts that have occurred each day by asking for updates at the end of every day.

Two Axes Multiple Quadrants Making Meaning Visually Of Deep Information

This example is for a 1 day training course, with measurement taken in the morning, and again at the end of the afternoon. The visual changes above indicate an increase in knowledge (horizontal shift) and/or improvement in enthusiasm (vertical shift) - overall a very positive result for the training I provided that day!

Thankyou for supporting! Let me know how it goes!

My favourite coaching tools: The Invisible Gorilla

Caveats:
None.

Required:
The internet
Environment or headphones in order to listen to the video
2 minutes to watch the video
A lifetime to think about the video after watching it

Step 1: Prepare your coachee's browser by going to http://www.dansimons.com/videos.html

Step 2: Click on the first video in the box and let your coachee watch

This video, and others that Professor Dan Simons provides on the above link, as well as a few more at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html, highlight some very interesting things about how very real and/or very imaginary our world is to ourselves. And hence how complicated things get when interacting with others who are experiencing the same brain processes. This is a problem more of encoding than memory apparently as humans are much better at encoding "things" occurring near the core of our current focus than those on the periphery.

I first found references to this video in Karl Sabbagh's book The Hair of the Dog: And Other Scientific Surprises which contains a number of other really useful scientific surprises some of which I have incorporated into my toolkit.