What’s your favorite place?

What's your favorite place to collaborate, kibitz, and all around community build?

The location of any group meeting conveys a message all on its own.  Some of our most moving and magical collaborative moments have occurred by taking a twist on the usual board room or office meeting space. For example, we have facilitated and hosted in our own homes or in coffee shops (think First Nation spirituality conversations while nestled in circular placed couches or watching strength inspired movie clips while lounging in a family setting). Several times we have held meetings and celebrations out of the usual conference room and donned outdoor gear (think strategic planning scavenger hunt in a park or annual networking events while walking on the beach - true stories).

So if you are looking for some mindful meeting magic remember to think about the physical space and location. Being intentional sets the tone for the type of interaction that will evolve.

• If you are thinking creative - be playful and unexpected with the environment.
•  If you are thinking renewal and rejuvenation – design a space to be calm and filled with natural elements. 
• If you are thinking relationship building and networking – use a space to allow movement and connection.

Your turn...tell us your favorite place to do it. Collaboration that is! 

Share your meeting space "twist" or collaborative location ideas and help inspire other village raisers!
Post on RTV facebook or Twitter.

RTV #39 - Re-energize: 7 Easy Ways to Bring Humour to Your Work

A Year of Raising the Village - Week #39: Re-energize - 7 Easy Ways to Bring Humour to Your Work!

When’s the last time you bust a seam while at the water cooler? Let off some steam as a team? Did the co-worker stomach clutch while tears trickled down your face?

It's been awhile, you may say, there’s complex issues, big deadlines, budget constraints and unmet client challenges...where’s the humour in that?
Perhaps that’s all the more reason to find where your group chuckle lies. According to this list – there are more than 101 ways to create humor at work! This list holds MORE than clown costumes and fun. In fact, it highlights ways to create better leaders, build engaged relationships and increase productivity (all of which are prime Village Raising components)!

Here we highlight 7 at work re-energizers that caught our eye (do adapt these to any group, team, or organization you work with):

1. Post it: post on a bulletin board in the common area; take turns with coworkers posting different topics on the board (add some light and "getting to know you" topics)
2. Get Cartoony: start a cartoon board and post fav. Illustrations
3. Showcase your kids – start a mural of “look at what my kid made” – team members will be sure to delight
4. Tell the future: Build a paper fortune teller using work lingo
5. Mix it up: Create work appropriate (and self selected) nicknames for people on your team using anagrams (or make pirate names, or name your department or…)
6. Improv.: Play improv. games as a team
7. Pin ups: Make a themed calendar full of pictures of your group

For the full list go to: http://www.humorthatworks.com/how-to/101-ways-to-create-humor-at-work

Village Raising Question:
How do you bring humour to work? What’s the benefit to you and for others?

Village Raising – Strength style!

“What makes you feel strong?”

Imagine being asked this question at the start to every team, organizational or community meeting you attended. Then, what if you are given the space and time to speak what strengthens you! Nice, right? Take this one step further and imagine your strength declaration being directly applied to a plan that moves forward the work at hand. Tis’ this not the energized life and work we seek?

Although it may not be practical to partake in a full strengths discovery in every meeting – strengths can be incorporated in some way into every kind of meeting. Each person is full of strengths and carries them everywhere they go. Strengths are part of our DNA if you will. We do not hang our strengths up on a coat rack when we enter a meeting room or work zone and leave them behind (although we may not be using them to their fullest). For us at Raising the Village, we often hear that people struggle with how to take their personal strength knowledge and use it beyond a level of general or self awareness. People are looking for ways to bring their strengths to the bigger picture – to their teams, organizations and communities!

We offer 7 concrete examples that focus on how you can take your group’s strengths (both individual and collective strengths) and actually integrate them into action.

1. Use strengths directly in your action plan to put some momentum behind your projects. “This is going to get done by making full use of [insert strength here]”.

2. Examine strengths alongside local research data. See what your community is really good at and USE those things to address any challenges or to compliment what the research says.

3. Bring a community strength list out during times of conflict or territorial issues between partners. Ask the group how the strengths can be used to help solve tricky ‘working together” problems or to determine which “roles” to play in decision making processes.

4. Look at challenges/projects with different perspectives. For example, ask: What is the benefit of looking at this through a strength lens of [insert strength here]? What would an [insert strength word here] view say?

5. To encourage creative thinking – put the group’s strength words into a hat. With a clearly defined challenge or issue on the table, pull out a couple of strengths and force some associations between them. This will help to think about the challenge in a new way.

6. Use strengths in evaluating what works. Have a space on meeting evaluation forms that asks people; “How did you use your strengths in today’s meeting?” Be brave enough to also ask; “If you did not use your strengths today…why not?”

7. Build confidence in your community by focusing on what jazzes people up. Strengths can be recognized and celebrated in an ongoing way. Consider a visual display of strengths (individual and community) in your meeting room, place of work or gathering spot.

Good ole Law of Attraction states that we tend to create what we focus on the most. Besides, honouring people for who they are and what they bring, incorporating strengths into our organizational or community cultures make it easier and safer for people to offer up their best. Using our strengths creates a vibrant personal life which in turn feeds into vibrant villages (and vice versa). It’s this work that strengthens individuals and communities and keeps strengths off the coat rack.

Village Raising Questions:
What’s important about sharing our strengths?
What strengths are you ready to offer up more intentionally?
How might you do this in a collective way?

Creating An Elephant Friendly Zone.

If given the choice would you choose six big or six small elephants? Your response may depend on whether you are recruitment staff for a circus or safari expedition or thinking of elephants in the meeting room. Many of us have heard, and may have even used, the phrase elephants in the room -the issues, comments, questions or topics that people don’t want to say out loud for various reasons. Perhaps words are unspoken due to perceived conflict, a clash of personalities, or a moment of self doubt in your own knowledge and power. Essentially elephants are THINGS NOT SAID.

So what does the size of elephants have to do with anything? A colleague of ours once asked us if we would choose six big or six small elephants. She said- there is always going to be elephants but we can decide on the size of the elephant. The bigger the elephants the less space in the room. We couldn’t agree more (thanks Cathy). Now take a moment to literally picture elephants increasing in size before your very eyes. If elephants are not spoken and instead given time to grow in size – how would people move in a room? How would people feel free and open to focus and concentrate on the important work of Raising the Village?

The objective is NOT to have an “elephant free zone” but to create a small elephant friendly zone if you will. Decreasing the size of elephants can be supported by the group facilitator AND the group.

Responsibility of the facilitator(s) is to:

• be aware of when energy changes in the room, watch for change in body language
• acknowledge what is witnessed and bring it out in the room for clarity
• speak the unspoken question or concern
• guide the conversation with an open principle
• provide various ways for elephants to cleanse themselves (i.e. provide a written evaluation sheet asking participants to share any elephants, posting a sheet on the meeting room wall, or maybe it’s repeated use of the language and concept – given that the concept lands well with the group).
  

Responsibility of the participant’s is to:

• speak directly to any personal elephants – issues and feelings- rather than “side talk” or after meeting talk. Bring those elephants forth- you’ll be amazed at how “speaking your truth” in an open way benefits the whole group.
• voice any elephants they notice herding in the room
• ask for a process to bring up elephants in the room
• celebrate those that speak up – see their opinions as value-added to the group growth

Village Raising Question:
Creating an elephant friendly zone takes courage, insight, and perhaps a desire to walk on the “wild side”. What are your ideas for welcoming elephants into the room?