As children, it is so natural for us to play games. During these game-times we learn a lot of things, that affects our thinking, feeling and actions. Usually, these learning-by-doing moments happen unnoticed, thus naturally. However, as we grow up we forget about the importance of this special kind of learning setting. And to be honest, not every type of game is applicable to adult life right? I mean would you really kneel down and dug a tunnel in a sandbox? Fortunately, there are many other ways to bring back some playing into our lives! One of them is to start using more games in your workshops...and Thiagi’s game collection might just be a great resource for that!
Thiagi (Sivasailam Thiagarajan, Ph. D.) a.k.a the “Game guru” realized quite early on that games provide a natural setting and framework even for adults to learn from. He started his consulting business in 1976 and now 40 years later he is still working on the same mission with his team of experts. That is to help people achieve more through performance-based training which is motivating and effective by supporting them to improve their performance in an enjoyable way.
Over the years Thiagi and his team created and collected more than 100 games and methods that can be used for different purposes from energisers and icebreakers to improv games. Among the most popular ones, you will find “jolts” and “textra” games. The first one refers to such games that are experimental and lull participants into a comfortable behaviour pattern then suddenly deliver a powerful wake-up call. For instance “Excited” is a 3-minute jolt that explores the facts that make an activity highly motivating.
Excited #energiser #ice breaker #thiagi
Here's a 3-minute jolt activity that enables the participants to explore what makes a task highly motivating.
Textra games refer to those activities where participants begin by completing a reading assignment before participating in the activity that uses peer support. Just like “Open Book” which helps participants get familiar with a manual before making a quiz out of it.
Open Book #review #questions and answers #explore and understand #thiagi
Open Book is a quiz game that helps participants become familiar with the structure and organization of a reference manual. During the first phase of the game, individual participants review the manual and prepare 10 questions. During the second phase, participants form into teams and select their five best questions. During the third phase, you conduct a quiz program using these questions and some others that you have prepared earlier.
Another strong pillar of these games is that there is always a debriefing after the experience. Because games can be fun, comfortable and effective but only if we are able to reflect on what has just happened and what we have learned from it. Most of the times the content itself is not that important, but if you skip the 5-10 minute debriefing section you are robbing people from actively think through and identify the learning points.
Although most of the activities are formed as games, it does not mean you will find only icebreakers and energisers among the methods. You can dive into various topics, for instance, communication, change management, leadership, or problem-solving with the help of these games. A handy bonus is that all of the methods are following a nice, clear and easily understandable structure so everyone has a chance to become a “game guru”.
So are you considering to use some games for your next workshops or training sessions? We have great news: Now you can find the best Thiagi games easily searchable and tagged by theme in the SessionLab public library of facilitation methods.
Go ahead, check them out, and mark your favourite ones so you have them at hand for your next session!
If you want to know more about the Thiagi Group, its activities, the expert team, their community and upcoming events, you may visit their official website for further information.
Ever since we released the first version of SessionLab, we received many requests to develop a better option to create multi-day agendas.
It is a frequent scenario that a workshop or training session spans longer than a day, and previously the only option was to create two separate sessions for each day and then trying to manage them together in the multi-plan view. That was certainly a cumbersome way to deal with such sessions.
We are happy to announce that support for multi-day agendas is now available in SessionLab!
With the new feature, you can open separate days (day-sessions) under a session if you want to design a session that spans over multiple days. Each new day is displayed on a different tab, and you are able to display your whole multi-day session in the multi-plan view with one click.
A multi-day session is treated as one session on your dashboard, and when you invite collaborators for your multi-day session, then your collaborators automatically get access to all day-sessions as well.
In this post, we want to give you some tips for how to use this new feature. You can skip to the relevant use cases if you want to:
Create a multi-day agenda
Merge already existing session plans into a new multi-day session
Add any existing session plans into an existing multi-day session
Remove a day-session from a multi-day session into a separate session plan
Additionally, you can find a few pro tips about how to:
Rename your days
Change the order of your days
Invite collaborators
Delete a day from your multi-day session
Create a multi-day agenda
In order to create a multi-day session, you first need to create a simple session or open an existing session plan. You will find an ‘Add day’ button under the session’s name in the header.
When you click on this button, it will result in the following:
Your initial single-day plan becomes a day-session named ‘Day 1’
A new day-session name ‘Day 2’ gets created.
You just need to click on the day you want to work on and create your first blocks. If you want to create further days, just click on the ‘Add day’ button.
Merge already existing session plans into one multi-day session
You can merge any existing session plans into one multi-day session. This might be particularly useful if you previously created separate sessions for a workshop that spanned over several days.
In order to do it, first, open one of the sessions you want to merge and navigate to the Multi Plan View.
Once you are in the Multi Plan View, load the other sessions you want to be merged by clicking on Open session button and selecting the session.
When you opened the session(s) you want to merge, click on More options icon and select the Join multi-day option: (If you have multiple sessions open in the Multi Plan View, you are able to select which one you want to merge with)
As a result, a multi-day session is created that automatically took the name of the first day-session. You can simply change the name of the multi-day session here in the Multi Plan view, and also change the name of the day-sessions if you click on the Edit icon.
Add any existing session plans into an existing multi-day session
If you want to add any of your already existing session plans into an existing multi-day session, then you should follow the same process as when merging sessions: open the sessions in the Multi Plan View, and on the session you want to merge, select the Join multi-day option.
Remove a day-session from a multi-day session into a separate session plan
You can extract a day from your multi-day session in the Multi Plan View to become a single session. Just click on the further options icon under the day-session’s name, and select the option ‘Extract’.
Rename your days
The new day-sessions you create are automatically assigned a name, but you can change that, together with adding a description and a date for the day-session.
You can rename a day-session two ways. One way is to open the day-session and click on the Info tab on the right side. You can find here the description of the multi-day session at the top, and the description of the day-session under that.
When you create a multi-day session, the day-sessions will automatically inherit the client and tags from the multi-day (parent) session, but not the description. So if you want to change any of this information for the day session, just click on ‘Edit info’.
Now you are able to change the name, date, client, tags and description of the day-session.
Tip: The date of the multi-day session is always computed from the dates of the day-sessions: it will show a range of the earliest and latest day-session’s date.
When you finished editing, just click on ‘Done’. Your changes are automatically saved as you type, so if you navigate away without clicking on Done, your changes will stay saved.
Change the order of your days
The order of your days are automatically calculated from the date of your sessions: the one with the earliest date will be the first and the one with the latest date will be the last one. If you haven’t filled out the date for your day-sessions, then further algorithms will order them based on their name (considering if there is any kind of numbering that indicates an order). If you want to change that, the easiest way is to assign the proper dates for your sessions.
Invite collaborators
When you invite collaborators for a multi-day session, then the collaborator rights you assign will be applied for each day-session. In the current version, there is no opportunity to set different collaborator rights for the day-sessions.
If you merge different session together into one multi-day session, then the collaborator rights will be added up to the multi-day session and then populated back to each day-session. If you want to merge Session A where you invited Frank as editor, and Session B where you invited Anna as viewer, then Frank will become an editor and Anna will become a viewer of both the multi-day session and for its day-sessions Session A and Session B.
When you remove a collaborator from the multi-day session, then consequently she will be removed from all day-sessions as well. (Since there is no support yet for differentiated collaborator rights per day-session).
Delete a day from your multi-day session
You can delete a day from your multi-day session in the Multi Plan View. Just click on the further options icon under the day-session’s name, and select the option ’Delete’.
We hope you found this short support article useful to get started with creating and managing multi-day sessions in SessionLab. If you have any questions, just write us at [email protected]
Over the past months, we received a lot of suggestions about how to improve the dashboard, as it became harder and harder to have a good overview if you one many sessions created or shared with.
Now we are happy to announce the new redesigned dashboard as the solution to always stay on top of what’s happening on your own or in your team’s workspace!
What’s new there?
1) New views (Recent, Personal, Your Team) help you to find your sessions: you get an easy overview of what is in your Personal and in your Team workspaces. Besides, you can find a Recent view where you can always see your 24 most recently modified sessions where you are a collaborator at, regardless of which workspace they are located at.
Tips:
The Recent view shows session from your whole account, regardless of which workspace and folder they are located in. Since this view only displays sessions, the folders are not displayed here, and you cannot create folders while being in the Recent view
The Recent view shows only those sessions where you are invited as a collaborator. (While in your Team workspace view, you can see all sessions under your Team account, even if you are not invited to the session as a collaborator)
2) List layout, where sessions are shown in a table, is now available in addition to the grid layout with cards so it becomes easier to have an overview of your sessions at one glance.
3) Folders are allowing you to group sessions together and structure your workspace. Viewing and creating folders is support in the Personal and Team workspace views.
You can create a Folder by navigating to your Personal or Team workspace, and clicking on the New Folder button in the upper right corner:
How to rename sessions
There are various ways to rename folders are sessions. If you want to do it on the Dashboard, then click on the Edit Info button of the folder or session (in grid view). The Edit info button will only be available for the folders and sessions where you are the owner or you have editor rights.
The same renaming option is also available in list view, with the exception that you cannot edit the session description since it is not displayed in list view. Nonetheless, you can adjust the name, date, client and tags of the sessions, and the name of folders.
How to duplicate a session?
Have you ever wanted to create a copy of any of your previous sessions, so you can use it for a new session design without compromising the original version? You can do it easily on the dashboard.
In grid view:
In list view:
Workspaces and folders - Where do my sessions get created?
As a Basic or Pro user of SessionLab, you have access to one workspace: your Personal workspace. As a consequence of this, all the sessions you create will automatically be created in your Personal workspace.
If you create a session while being in the Recent view, the session will automatically be placed in the root of your Personal workspace. If you create a session while being in a folder in your Personal workspace, then the session will be created in the folder.
Don’t worry, you can easily move your session within your folder structure, see below in the section about moving sessions.
If you are member of a Team account in SessionLab, then you also get access to the Team’s workspace, beyond your own Personal workspace. In this case, if you are in the Recent view, the default workspace where your sessions get created is your Team’s workspace.
If you are not in the Recent view, but either in your Team’s or your Personal workspace, or any of their subfolders, then the session you create will get created at the workspace and folder where you were located when pressing the New Folder button.
How to see which workspace does a session of mine belong to?
If you are within the view of your Personal or Team workspace, then naturally you only see the sessions belonging to that workspace. However, you might ask, how do I know which workspace does my session belong to, if I am in the Recent view or if I have already opened the session?
You can find the answer in the collaborators’ list. If you see a Team logo listed among the collaborators, it means that the session belongs to that team’s workspace. If you do not see a Team logo among the collaborators, it means that the session can be found at your Personal workspace
You also can find the same information if you open the session, and navigate to the Collaborator tab on the right side menu:
You can see on the screenshot above that this session belongs to the workspace of “My Team”, and therefore all members of the team account has the right to view this session.
How to move sessions and folders?
You can do it easily on the dashboard by clicking on the More options icon on the session card, clicking on Move and selecting the destination folder.
In grid view:
In list view:
The activity indicator
Always stay up-to-date with what happened in your sessions: an activity indicator marks your session if it has been edited by your colleagues while you were away. See the orange dot on the screenshots below:
The indicator is also available in list view:
We hope you found this short support article useful to get the most out of the new dashboard in SessionLab. If you have any questions, just write us at [email protected]
Simple rules that make it easy to include and unleash everyone in shaping the future (or at least the next meeting)
Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz sure had these kind of impressions and questions in their minds when they met in 2003 at Plexus Institute. They both had background in complexity science, improving organization’s workflow and learning methods. They shared a hunch that conventional structures (reports, presentations etc.) are too inhibiting while other techniques (brainstorming) are too loose. So building on a few methods they created Liberating Structures (the term itself is based on theory of power by William Torbert) that incorporates principles from complexity science, organizational development, improvisational arts, and user experience.
The aim of Liberating Structures is to enhance creativity, trust and relational coordination while making every participant feel included and heard in meetings. The methodology follows the principle that attracting (rather than compelling) lively participation generates momentum for change and innovation. It is known that if you give everyone a choice of many innovative methods (without the pressure of a top-down “best practices”) then innovation will flourish. With the help of 34 easy-to-learn methods, you will be able to structure the way people interact with each other, leaving more room to the content. Liberating Structure methods help to make the process more explicit and understandable for everyone since it increases the ownership of solutions by including large groups of people. If used regularly, these methods will make meetings easier and more effective resulting in practices that have a meaning for everyone.
For example, when it comes to law and lawmaking sessions, the last thing we would think about is that it could be transformed into a discussion that is effective, simple, and involves everyone. Still the latter happened when one lawyer introduced a couple of Liberating Structures methods during a conference on children’s justice issue. He began to plan the session by using Design Storyboard to draw out all the different activities.
You can avoid many of the traps that turn transformation initiatives and innovation projects into failures: the lack of a clear and common purpose, overall and for every stage of the initiative; inadequate engagement and participation; voices that are essential but not included; frustrated participants and nonparticipants; resistance to change; groupthink; nightmarish implementation for a disproportionally small impact. A comprehensive design is a series of basic designs (see Design StoryBoards–Basic above) linked together over a period of time. The design unfolds iteratively over days, weeks, months, or sometimes years depending on the scale of the project. Small cycles of design operate within larger cycles, scaling up and out as the initiative proceeds. You can easily include more people and more diversity in the design group for larger-scale projects. You can reflect the twists and turns in a transformation or innovation effort by a careful and ad hoc selection of participants (including unusual suspects since they are often the source of novel approaches).
Then introduced Impromptu Networking as an icebreaker to start the workshop. It raised the energy level and kicked off the conversation between participants.
Improv Prototyping #role playing #team #explore and understand #liberating structures
You can engage a group to learn and improve rapidly from tapping three levels of knowledge simultaneously: (1) explicit knowledge shared by participants; (2) tacit knowledge discovered through observing each other’s performance; and (3) latent knowledge, i.e., new ideas that emerge and are jointly developed. This powerful combination can be the source of transformative experiences and, at the same time, it is seriously fun. Participants identify and act out solutions to chronic or daunting problems. A diverse mix of people is invited to dramatize simple elements that work to solve a problem. Innovations represented in the Improv sketches are assembled incrementally from pieces or chunks that can be used separately or together. It is a playful way to get very serious work done!
With Social Network Webbing he showed that all of the participants have a network or collaboration opportunities.
Social Network Webbing #visual mapping #team #liberating structures #connection
Social Network Webbing quickly illuminates for a whole group what resources are hidden within their existing network of relationships and what steps to take for tapping those resources. It also makes it easy to identify opportunities for building stronger connections as well as new ones. The inclusive approach makes the network visible and understandable to everybody in the group simultaneously. It encourages individuals to take the initiative for building a stronger network rather than receiving directions through top-down assignments. Informal or loose connections—even your friends’ friends—are tapped in a way that can have a powerful influence on progress without detailed planning and big investments.
At the end 1-2-4-All provided a great platform to discuss the leadership challenges all lawmakers face at some point in their career.
1-2-4-All #idea generation #explore and understand #liberating structures
You can immediately include everyone regardless of how large the group is. You can generate better ideas and more of them faster than ever before. You can tap the know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance. Open, generative conversation unfolds. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion. Most importantly, participants own the ideas, so follow-up and implementation is simplified. No buy-in strategies needed! Simple and elegant!
You can find other intriguing case studies on the official Liberating Structures website.
Do you want to run a session using Liberating Structures methods?
The great news is, you don’t have to take special courses, or be certified Liberating Structures facilitator to use them. The methods are deliberately simple and anyone can lead a session by applying them. Just check out Liberating Structures in SessionLab and start shaping your organization’s future.
If you are eager to find out more about background of the methods or the community behind them, visit the official website to find more inspiration, case studies and practical tips how to build the Liberating Structures on each other.
The most useful free online tools for facilitators
There are plenty of online tools that can make your everyday life easier if you are preparing to facilitated an interactive session. The good thing is that you don’t have to pay a fortune to use technology that helps you make your job easier. In fact, there are plenty of free tools you can use to get yourself more productive in the process of preparing or following up a facilitated session.
We have collected the most useful tools we encountered while talking to our SessionLab users and from our personal experience. It was an important factor among the selection criteria that each of the tools should have a functional free version available without time limitation to use, so one can rely on them on the long term for personal use.
We grouped them according to the type of tasks they are used for, so you can find precisely what you need. Importantly, these tools may be just as useful if you facilitate face-to-face meetings or a training, as well as if you would facilitate online sessions. They are most useful for the preparation and follow-up work, not for the actual facilitation itself.
Your favorite tool is not on the list? Let us know in the comments.
UPDATE 2017-04-05: We have updated this post with some new tools including a new section on online whiteboards.
1) Creating forms for needs assessment or evaluation
If you ask for feedback from participants, and you want to go beyond using ‘happy sheets’ - paper forms filled out right after the workshop on the spot, then you may decide to create an online survey after the session. Alternatively, you might want to conduct a needs assessment survey for the preparations. You can select from a wide range of online survey tools that can do the job for you. Our favourites are:
Google Forms allow you to create unlimited surveys with 6 types of questions and skip logic that can guide your participants through your survey depending on their answers. This free service has seamless integration with Google's other apps, including Gmail and spreadsheets. The best part: it is absolutely free, unlike most of the competition that have usage limits in their free versions.
As a relatively new kid on the block, Typeform has made filling out forms engaging and interactive. The forms look fresh and modern, promising that users are more likely to enjoy the survey experience and complete it all the way through. Typeform offers unlimited surveys of maximum 10 questions in the free version, while the paid version adds extra features, such as advanced question types and conditional logic.
Having been around since 1999, SurveyMonkey is one of the longest running online survey services in the world. SurveyMonkey does the basics and does them well, providing a reliable alternative. In the free version, however, you will be limited to 10 questions, 100 respondents per survey, and no possibility to export your data.
The downside of the free versions is that they will include their own branding in the survey which may be an issue for some of you.
2) Cloud storage and sharing with your co-workers
These popular file sharing solutions let you access all your files on your phone or tablet device, and are also working well to share documents with your colleagues. If you want to store your files in the cloud and sync it over your devices, you have plenty of services to choose, most notably:
Dropbox was a pioneer on this market with their reliable and easy-to-use sharing system when you use tons of different kinds of devices. They offer a free option with 2GB of storage.
Google Drive, offering 15GB free storage, has the additional benefit of a built-in office suite, where you can edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, even if you created the document in another program. If you work with remote teams and customers all around the world, Google Drive works great for a number of things, especially collaborative spreadsheets, and it’s great to be able to share links with people to collaborate on documents straight from your browser.
Similarly to survey tools, some of your clients might be sensitive about having data about their business stored in such services. There are more enterprise solutions out there (e.g. Box) that can be worth checking out in such cases.
3) Video conferencing – Communicate with your colleagues or clients while working remote
The difficulty of working with someone who is sitting somewhere else can be reduced when you see each other and/or you are watching the same screen. Skype and Google Hangouts are competing head-to-head on this market:
Skype puts a big accent on reducing the barriers to entry for users, therefore it is a great choice for connecting to participants with questionable computers, connections, or technical knowledge. On the downside, there is a long history of Skype calls suffering from quality issues, especially if some of the participants are using a cellular connection. However, this issue is becoming less and less prominent in the past years.
Hangouts requires all members to have a Google Plus account and it provides a cross-platform functionality similar to Skype. It became well-known for its high video quality, and for offering better quality calls when bandwidth is low. Additionally, Hangouts offers many business-savvy features: for example, if you want to create webinars, Hangouts comes with an ‘on Air’ feature that can be shared with the world and can be recorded and stored on YouTube.
While Skype and Hangouts brought free video conferencing available to anyone, a number of new players emerged on this market now offering better quality, reliability and ease of use. Our two new favourites are:
Appear.in comes in to help when all other tools fail. You just open a video conferencing room, send the link to your guests and they can join without having to install anything or create an account.
Zoom provides exceptionally reliable quality, minimising audio or video latency issues that you usually encounter with most video conferencing applications. The only downside is the 40 minutes call limit for group calls on the free version.
4) Online whiteboards
Seeing each other while talking through a video conferencing application can make remote working easier, but what happens with the magic of being in the same room and working on the same whiteboard? Complex problem solving often requires a visual platform to brainstorm and come up with creative ideas, and online whiteboards can more and more replicate the feeling of working on the same board in person.
Both Realtimeboard and Deekit offer an endless flexible space where you can collaborate and share ideas. You can create an online canvas and use that as a simple whiteboard for jotting down ideas, or as an infinite board for building a project with a remote team. They allow to create mockups and schemes, quickly add stickers, write down ideas and leave feedback.
Realtimeboard: Besides the regular online whiteboard features of uploading images, creating notes, drawing in different colors and sizes in freehand mode, the app offers a great template library to conveniently find the right structure you need for your whiteboard. The free version offers up to 3 boards and 3 team members.
Deekit also allows to write and sketch anywhere on your board, embed content from the web, and allows to export boards to share them with others. The template library helps a lot to get started with right style of whiteboard for your work. The free version offers 4 boards with 2 team members.
5) Manage tasks collaboratively
There is a vast amount of task management software available on the market. Some are part of big project management tools, while others are dedicated only to keeping your tasks in order. Below are our top choices:
Trello offers a flexible and visual way to organize anything with anyone. Trello is organized in boards inspired by Kanban methodology. You can add lists to the board and cards to the lists. Each card can have individual checklists, uploaded documents or pictures, and discussion in form of comments. You can easily invite your co-workers to sign up for their own free Trello account. Instead of using emails and instant messages, you can use Trello to communicate.
Wunderlist is more specialized for personal organization in their free plan: you can create different lists and to-dos, make a task repeating, prioritize your lists, set reminders and due dates. It also offers a sharing function, so you can send the training preparation list to your co-trainer.
If you have a bigger facilitation project, you may want use a more specialised project management software to help your team collaborating without getting flooded by emails. Asana is an intuitive task-management system that works best for teams seeking real-time interaction and it's free for up to 15 users.
All of three of them has easy-to-use mobile versions and allow syncing over devices. With either of them you can drop the lengthy email threads and out-of-date spreadsheets if you want to get your tasks organised and collaborate effectively with your co-facilitators. You can also export your tasks to your calendar.
6) Taking notes – organising and sharing information
Noting down various bits of information pouring in during the training process is crucial: when talking with clients, jotting down some personal follow-up steps, and so on. For this, having a pen and a piece of paper on you is essential, but organizing, finding, and sharing your notes is easier when using digital tools.
And doing it online has never been easier. There are plenty of apps allowing you to jot down thoughts, sync them across devices and share with your colleagues. We will present the two leading players in the segment, with somewhat different strengths:
Evernote lets you easily capture, organize, and find content from the Web. You can highlight text on the web, take screenshots, write your own notes, etc. The notes can be tagged, shared, formatted (to some extent), and you can even assign tasks to them. And these are just some of its many features.
Microsoft OneNote has similar set of features to Evernote, but the approach in organizing your notes is different. OneNote supports a more defined structure, as you can have several levels of notebooks, pages, and subpages. It also provides richer formatting options, which are especially useful when doing creative work as it allows you to start typing anywhere on the page.
Although they differ in the way they work, what they have in common is the most important advice for using any software for taking notes: you actually need to remember to use it. These tools really become useful when all your notes are in the same place and you can use powerful search and sharing features.
7) Session planning and facilitation knowledge base
Session outlines, exercises, diversity of interaction methods, materials needed, libraries of facilitation tools and methods, etc. How best to organize all these elements specific to a facilitated session? You might use some of the previously mentioned tools (e.g. cloud storage to share Excel or Google Spreadsheet workshop plans) but it is typically hard to capture all the important details and have an overview at the same time. This is what we are addressing with our own tool, which is also free to use:
SessionLab is an online session planner tool for facilitators and trainers doing facilitated sessions, providing a platform that is designed for the flexible and iterative process of building up a workshop or training schedule – making your process design work a real flow experience. As you build up your session outline, all the various modules and exercises you enter into the system become searchable and reusable by you, together with the additional comments and attached documents you might add for a specific module of your session. When looking for new inspiration, you can find facilitation tools and specific exercises in a public library that you can seamlessly add to your own session plan. You can also share the workshop plans with your clients or colleagues and work together on it simultaneously. And yes, we’re blowing our own horn, but mainly because we love using it.
Currently SessionLab focuses on designing a session plan and helping facilitators and trainers explore and find useful content for their session. We are working to extend SessionLab to become a comprehensive tool that supports you in each stage of session preparation, delivery, and follow-up.
Bonus:Tools are only part of the solution and while they can make your work easier, the quality of your sessions will come from the content. Check out our post on various free online resources for workshop and training activities.
All these online tools are worth checking out, and hopefully they will save you time and make your facilitation related work go even more smoothly. Let us know in the comments if you missed something on the list!
2016 was an inspiring year for us. Many facilitators discovered our platform, we worked on and delivered exciting new features, and we continued learning and growing along the way. As the year comes to a close we have one more important announcement left: we are changing the name of our platform to SessionLab. While there is no change in the features and functionality of the platform, you can continue reading our reflection on the past few years and reasons behind the name change.
When we founded TrainedOn a few years ago we aimed to solve the problems we experienced ourselves while working as trainers in a youth NGO. We often built our training sessions on the experience of previous trainers and workshops, but it was tedious work finding the right content. And building the session plans in Excel was no fun either.
Two and a half years ago the first users logged in to the initial prototype of TrainedOn to plan their training sessions. Since then we have gone a long way, and the toolkit for soft skill trainers we initially envisioned was gradually developed to become a process design tool to help anyone preparing a facilitated session. With this growth we also saw a wide variety of professionals starting to use our platform for session planning, and learned a great deal about how to help and inspire people in their session preparations.
In 2015 we made our session planner a more collaborative tool and introduced the library of session resources. This year we focused on making the application suitable for teams and introduced private libraries to collect teams’ best practices and to develop their own knowledge base. We also brought some long awaited features for everybody like rich-text formatting and better time management.
And now, at the end of the year, we are announcing one more change that is a small step for you, but an important step for us. And that is the new name of our platform:
Why SessionLab? Our purpose is to support you in preparing and delivering better facilitated sessions. We want to help you find the best methods for your workshops, be effective in session preparations and capture your learnings to continuously improve. We built our solution to provide a platform where you can find the necessary ingredients to design a high-impact interactive session, and where it is easy to experiment while coming up with thoughtful session designs. Like a laboratory for designing great sessions - SessionLab!
For our facilitators, trainers, service designers, innovation consultants and meeting professionals we are still committed to offering the best product and support, thus we are making this transition in a way that does not require any changes on your part. The legal entity behind SessionLab remains the same as it was, TrainedOn OÜ - our company incorporated in Estonia.
To reflect the name change and the growing amount of resources shared on the platform, we have updated our Terms of Service, so be sure to check them out and contact us if there are any questions.
As we take this next step as a company, we want to thank all of you for your continued support and enthusiasm. We are excited to continue building the service that makes your lives easier so you can focus on what you do best: make things easier for your clients!
🔓Lock the time of any block and 12-hour time option ⏰
Today we are bringing you a couple of timekeeping improvements in TrainedOn:
a time lock which allows you to fix the starting time of any block
the option to switch to 12-hour (i.e. AM/PM) time in your schedules
Read on for more details about the new features.
Does it sometimes happen to you that certain parts of your schedule have to start at fixed time? For instance a lunch break tied to logistic requirements. When planning your workshop it can be annoying if such break drifts forward or backward as you modify the duration of other blocks.
To help with this we are introducing a time lock option: you can now fix the starting time of any of your blocks. If a lunch break needs to start at noon, then you can have it fixed for 12:00 in your session plan.
Whenever there is a gap between your locked blocks and the rest of your agenda an icon indicates that you have extra time to allocate.
This new feature will replace the previous way of setting the starting time of your session. Instead, now you just need to lock the time of the first block in your schedule. Your previous sessions that had a starting time set have automatically been transferred to the new method which means that, in effect, their schedule will remain the same.
The second improvement launched is the possibility to switch to 12-hour time in your schedule. If you prefer to use 05:00 PM instead of 17:00, just go ahead to your account settings and change to 12-hour option. You will see the new timing in all of your sessions and printouts. This setting is per user, so if you are collaborating with somebody, they will see the time based on their own setting.
Go ahead and check these new improvements at www.trainedon.com!
We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas in the comments.
Rich text formatting, session activity indicator & library commenting 💬
We are happy to bring you the latest updates in TrainedOn:
Let your text become rich! - not only in content but also in format. Rich-text formatting is now available in the session planner, so you can apply bold, italic, underline and bullet point formatting in any section of your session blocks.
Get to know in a glance if any of your sessions has been changed while you were away. If you work collaboratively on session plans, and your collaborators edit your session or make a comment while you are away, then an activity indicator ● will be shown on your homepage on the session card. Combine it with sorting sessions by ‘Modified date’, and you never miss an update of your sessions.
We also came up with a set of improvements in the library:
Commenting in library: Have you used a facilitation method from a library and you have feedback for it? By making comments on the library content you can start a conversation, share your feedback and build a living knowledge base of facilitation methods and practice.
Difficulty indicator: when you want to use a method you found in the library, wouldn’t it be good to know how difficult is this method to use from the author’s perspective? Now a 3-level indicator helps you to understand whether a particular method can be easily applied, or requires advanced skills to deliver.
New field in library to store background information: add historical development, references or any other bits of information that is not delivery-related. This enables you to keep the instructions field focused on the delivery-related information. Importantly, instructions are included on the session printout while background information is not.
This is a guest post by Gwendolyn Kolfschoten. Gwendolyn is an expert on collaboration, facilitation and group processes. As a researcher at Delft University of Technology, department of Technology Policy and Management, she studied collaboration processes for a decade. She was also a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the Engineering Systems Division. She has published many academic articles on collaboration and on tools and technologies to support group work, among them four dimensional framework about developing facilitation techniques that this post is about. Currently, Gwendolyn is the founder a company dedicated to supporting effective collaboration and the author of the book Effective Collaboration.
Like a real craftsman, each facilitator has a toolbox, a toolbox with instruments, methods and techniques to support groups in achieving their goals. Groups typically have two types of goals. First, groups bond, they form a team; develop relations, trust, culture, common ground and mutual understanding, as a basis for effective collaboration. However, ultimately, groups work together towards a joint goal. In the end, groups are mostly formed to create joint results, outcomes that require the expertise, skills, insights, experiences and creative ideas of the members of the group in order to solve complex problems. Such results often require support from stakeholders involved, and therefore they should be based on consensus and shared understanding.
To support groups in creating such outcomes, facilitators have developed and documented many different techniques for brainstorming, discussion and decision making. There are numerous libraries with such techniques. However, these techniques are typically not a one-size-fits-all solution. In most cases, facilitators adapt the tools to match the group, the task and the context in which they facilitate a collaboration process.
As a researcher, I have been looking for the essential elements of facilitation interventions. The more precise we can narrow down and document the intervention, the better we can predict their effects and, more important, their effectiveness. In this process I stumbled on a conceptual understanding of facilitation techniques in four dimensions. I compare them to pasta. Pasta can be made of different ingredients; flour, but also from potatoes, rice, and various other grains. Pasta can have different structures, spaghetti, penne, gnocchi, etc. Pasta can be processed in different ways, fresh, dried, cooked, baked in the oven, etc. Finally, pasta can be combined with other ingredients in different ways. It can be combined with a sauce, stuffed with meat or cheese, or layered like lasagna. All these aspects of pasta can be combined in many different ways, to create an endless variation of dishes. For facilitation techniques I created a similar system.
The ingredients of facilitation techniques are the type of input we work with. Many facilitation techniques are text based, when we brainstorm ideas, or share lessons learned, but we could also use sketching, model elements, numbers or stories as input for our facilitation technique. Visualization can be very powerful to support creativity, but also to develop shared understanding.
The structure of the facilitation techniques is the way we structure information. We can work in a list on a flip chart, but also in a mind-map structure, in a matrix model or in different categories. Depending on the complexity of the problem a different structure is suited to support the group in analyzing the problem and identifying a solution.
The facilitation techniques can also support different phases of information processing. We can share information, brainstorm ideas, structure or organize concepts, vote about information, revise and improve it, and make decision based on the information shared by the group. In this way, we can develop a process in which the group solved a problem in a sequence of steps.
Finally, facilitation techniques can be used in different modes of interaction. We can do some steps of a collaboration process in a plenary session, while others are better done individually, in a relay fashion, in small groups or in pairs. There are many ways to organize the interaction, and each has different impact on the quality of the results and the support for the outcomes.
With these four dimensions you can compose effective collaboration techniques that fit the task, the group, the process and the complexity of the context. With these techniques you develop the process required for the group to accomplish their task. However, you need two additional ingredients to finish your facilitation technique. First you need to formulate the question or instruction for each step. What is it the group needs to brainstorm, on what criteria do they decide, or on which topics will they need to find common ground and a shared vision. Second, you need to fill in the tools or materials to support the interactive technique. You could brainstorm ideas on yellow stickies’, but you can also type them in a shared document or chat tool. Different tools can be used to implement these facilitation techniques to support collaboration face-to-face or online.
We thank Gwendolyn for sharing this insight with us and invite you to share your opinions about this framework in the comments. If you are looking for methods you can use to build an effective collaboration check out our TrainedOn library.
Find and organise your sessions better in faster-than-ever TrainedOn
In this update we bring you a report on maintenance and some exciting teasers for the future.
In the past weeks we’ve been busy improving the ‘behind the scenes’ part of TrainedOn. As a result we got a faster and a more reliable platform than ever before. Of course, we included some new features as well that we know you’ve been looking forward to:
Mark your client for each session: Now you have a dedicated field to enter a client of a specific session. This can help you filter your sessions and find the ones assigned to specific clients more easily.
Less crowded dashboard: If you have a lot of sessions on the dashboard, now you will only see the 10 most recent in each group (your own sessions, the ones shared with you and your team’s sessions). The rest you can retrieve by clicking Load more.
Find and sort sessions: A new toolbar lets you quickly find a session by it’s name, description, tags, collaborators or the new client field. Whatever you enter will filter all the sessions on the dashboard, showing only the ones that match the criteria. You can also sort by session date, last modified time or alphabetically by name.
More paper size options: Besides the standard A4 size paper printout, now you can also choose US Letter or Legal paper size for your PDF printouts.
Go ahead and check them out at www.trainedon.com!
These are the first improvements in the line of many that we’re planning to help you organise your sessions better. Therefore, your feedback is more than welcome so please leave a comment.
Stay tuned for our next announcement. Hint: we are working on rebranding TrainedOn so soon you can get to know the new name for the app!
Use own private libraries and share sessions with a link
We are excited to introduce you the latest updates in TrainedOn.
Your Private and Team Libraries of facilitation resources: Do you have some favourite methods or exercises that you often (re)use in your sessions? Now you can add them to your dedicated Private Library in TrainedOn, so you can quickly find them next time you want to use them! If you work in a team, a new Team Library can be handy to have a shared knowledge base of facilitation methods within your team!
Add resources to library from your sessions: Next time you feel you have just created a block in one of your session worthy to be saved for later, just select Add to library... and you can store it as resource in your Private, Team’s or Public Library.
Share your session plans with clients without TrainedOn account: If you want to show your session plan to someone without forcing them to create a TrainedOn account (or sending a printout in PDF), you can now do it by creating and sharing a link to your session. By default your sessions are still private and you can enable the shareable link from the Collaborators sidebar for each session.
Go ahead and check it all out at www.trainedon.com!
We’re looking forward to further improving both the public and private libraries of TrainedOn to make them even more useful knowledge base for your session preparations. We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas!
The New Year is knocking on the doors, which brings an opportunity to reflect on what happened with TrainedOn in the past year. To put it into perspective, going from a hobby to an incubator in 2013 and then launching our product and tweaking the business last year, 2015 is best characterised by the words focus and learning, as it brought the most learning about our potential customers, which resulted in steady growth.
What were the highlights?
More than 100 interviews carried out with trainers and facilitators over 6 continents (yes, we are still missing Antarctica).
Learning that what we initially looked at as a training design tool for trainers is, from another perspective, a collaborative process design tool for facilitators. In fact, over the past couple of months, our user base became a diverse mixture of facilitators, trainers, and people from a wide array of professions who sometime prepare and lead interactive meetings.
In pure numbers, we started the year with 600 users and grew to 1400 by the end of the year.
More and more small teams use TrainedOn after the collaboration possibilities were introduced in the tool.
Adding a library of facilitation exercises.
Never ending learning as we are taking care of various aspects of building the app and running the company - among other useful sources, we got a ton of inspiration and practical examples from Groove’s blog about customer development and building a business.
Our team continued working remotely and got more experience in agile development as the default mode of operation.
In the meantime we felt a mental shift taking place, as we were turning from the glamour of the startup world towards aiming to build a sustainable and lean bootstrapped company.
Importantly, all the learnings and joyful moments of 2015 would not have had happened without you, so a huge thank you to all TrainedOn users and to everyone helping us on the way with their time and advice!
There is no better motivation for us than receiving feedback from our users, let it be improvement suggestions or just praises like this one received recently:
Going back to Excel after TrainedOn would be like going back to a regular phone after using a smartphone.
We're looking forward to continuing to support trainers and facilitators in 2016!
This is a guest post by Alex Ivanov. Alex and his team developed a simple-to-use and very visual framework called Team Canvas for teambuilding and team alignment that is available freely to anyone under Creative Commons licence. We are grateful to Alex for having shared this great tool with the facilitators’ community, and also glad to announce that you can find Team Canvas resources on SessionLab both in the library and as a Featured Session - so you can seamlessly integrate it in your next session plan if you decide to do so.
On average, only 46 out of 100 workgroups within organizations end up creating value for companies, and up to 92% of freshly created startup teams are destined to fail for various reason. A study mentioned by Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman suggests that 60+% of those reasons are related to problems within teams, e.g. miscommunication, unresolved conflicts, co-founder disagreements, key players leaving teams at pivotal moments and so on.
What makes it even worse is that the tools for team maintenance and leadership for various reasons are not easily available to small teams like startups and creative agencies, and are not widely used within even bigger companies.
Here is a simple question: Is there something you personally can do to make the team you work in more successful and productive? We suggest that simply put, yes.
The Team Canvas
A few months ago I and a friend of mine set up on a quest to package years of our experience into one product about leading, consulting and being part of small creative teams. We iterated on one simple template that could align team members of any small team and get them on the same page, resulting in more clarity and productivity no matter which stage of group development they were at.
We called the template Team Canvas (and picked up the format from well-established Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas) and tested our way through with multiple small teams around the world, both onsite and remote: early stage startups, creatives from advertising industry, student project groups, and innovation consultants.
The results we got were quite inspiring. Within two hours of a Team Canvas session, we managed to bring teams to a state of clarity and alignment, with their feedback ranging from ‘that was useful’ to ‘that was extremely valuable for us as a team’. Most teams could facilitate the session themselves, which meant that they could repeat such sessions without external help whenever they needed.
Who Is It For and How Does It Work
We believe these groups would benefit from The Team Canvas the most:
Facilitators - For having an easy-to-use and logical method with ready-made visuals available for facilitation team sessions
Team leaders - For having a simple framework that you can use with your small team for better alignment (nevertheless beyond a certain complexity you may prefer having an external facilitator)
Startup teams at the stage of forming, pivoting or growing
Team canvas consists of 9 parts that structure your team culture conversation. They are focusing around areas of:
Who you are;
Where you want to arrive;
How you work together; and
What exactly you agree to do to get there.
Running Team Canvas Session
Running Team Canvas is fairly easy:
Get the latest Team Canvas template from theteamcanvas.com. It’s free and licenced under Creative Commons (Attribution-Share Alike). You can also find Team Canvas session plan with all the instructions and examples in SessionLab and easily adjust it to your needs or include it other sessions.
Learn how Team Canvas works and decide which template, Team Canvas Basic or Team Canvas Complete, you would rather use at your current stage of the project.
Use mobile-friendly facilitator's guide to get your team ready for the session and as a step-by-step guide during the session
In case some people on your team are working remotely, we partnered with a few cool online collaboration platforms to let you arrange Team Canvas session along with skype/google hangouts call:
Real-time collaboration, printing options and more
In today’s update we are bringing you an important feature that makes TrainedOn a truly collaborative process design tool. Plus now you can customise your printouts.
Here are the detailed descriptions of the new goodies:
Real-time collaboration and editor rights: When you invite a collaborator for your workshop or training plan now you can work together at the same time on your plan. To do that you can give the new editor role to your collaborators which will allow them to edit all the plan details. The viewer role still remains for cases when you want to give only view and commenting rights to collaborators. Furthermore, you can see the changes anybody makes instantaneously as well as visual indicators showing who is currently online and which blocks of the plan are they working on.
See past changes: To help you have an overview of what changes were done to your plan we added the activity log to the planner sidebar. This is especially useful when someone was working on the plan while you were away.
Bigger text size and more options on printouts: Was the text on the printout of your plan too small to be useful during the delivery of your session? Or maybe you wanted the list of materials (part of extra block information we added in the last update) in your plan? New printout options come to the rescue. Switch between 3 different font sizes, select what information you want to see in the table or chose if you want to include extra information below the table.
Go ahead and check it all out at www.trainedon.com!
In the meantime we are working on new features to support needs assessment and evaluations for your session plans. We'd love to hear you feedback on these features so hit the comments below.
We are thrilled to introduce the TrainedOn Library of content blocks. You can already find more than 100 handpicked exercises collected from free public sources that you can search and filter by suggested number of participants, length of exercise and topics. Once you have found the exercise that fits, you can easily add it to your session plans.
Do you have an exercise that you would like to share with the community of trainers? Feel free to add your favourite exercises to the library. Our vision is to build the best public repository of training or workshop content knowledge and your contribution is more than welcome!
But that’s not all. There are other new features as well:
Add more information to your blocks: Each block can now have a detailed view where you can add goals, instructions (supported with rich-text formatting), and required materials. You can also find a list with a summary of all the required materials for your plan at one place.
See who the session plan is shared with right on your dashboard: Do you want an easy overview of your sharing settings without clicking on your plan? Now you can see it on the dashboard.
Updated block categories: A complex exercise with debriefing is quite a different cup of tea than a simple icebreaker or an energiser game. That’s why we added energiser as a new block category.
Go ahead and check out the new library!
We'd love to hear your feedback on the new features and your other ideas so please comment.
5 most useful free online sources for training activities
Good icebreakers, exercises, and energisers are essential for an engaging and effective training. It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for your training, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, profile of participants, and the time available.
UPDATE We have added 7 more links that you, our readers recommended, so be sure to check them out at the end of the article.
You may already have your favourite exercises for different training topics, but as you deliver more and more training, you do not want to use the same ones over and over again. Refreshing your exercises is good for experimenting with new ideas and, more importantly, to avoid doing a popular exercise that some of the participants have already done before. Repeating familiar exercises can alter and disrupt the intended learning experience for the group and leave a bad impression of you as not being innovative enough as a trainer.
Designing a brand new training activity can be exciting and rewarding in the long run but it is very time consuming, and many of us cannot afford to do it. We typically resort to other ways of finding new exercises, from asking our more experienced colleagues to buying a book full of training exercises or downloading licensed materials.
However, finding a proven quality exercises online is not easy. There are many resources online that are not cheap, and yet their quality is questionable. And even with the trusted resources there is still a lack of essential information that can help you ensure that your planned training activities are conducted in a good way. Information such as evaluation remarks, practical information about how effective was a given exercise for a particular audience, what are the important aspects to pay attention to, when did an exercise work, when did it not, and why, etc. Occasionally, you can find some of this information on professional forums, but not in a structured and easily accessible way.
This is our challenge, the problem we want to solve at SessionLab by creating a structured and searchable repository of training exercises, where you can easily check how has a certain training activity worked previously and how to best use it in your next training.
For now, here is the list of our favourite (and mostly free) online resources for training exercises and materials. We would be thrilled to see which are your proven sources.
Thiagi’s game list has more than 400 free games and exercises with detailed description, facilitation tips, and debriefing questions, ready-to-run for everyone. Without filtering it is not easy to find the exercise you are looking for, but currently the games are being migrated to a new site where you can filter them based on game type and game topic.
Businessballs.com is one of the most comprehensive collections of free soft skills training materials online. You can find video clips for teaching and training, teambuilding games, and theoretical background for dozens of training topics. Sometimes, the list wanders off the track a bit (for example with Cockney rhyming slang and funny air traffic controllers quotes), but whatever the material, it is always prepared with passion. The downside is the cumbersome search option that makes finding the right content less than fast.
TrainerBubble is a provider of training resources and training course materials. You can purchase complete course materials ready to edit, but you can also choose from more than 700 free training resources: icebreakers, energisers, training games, and team building games
Icebreakers.ws contains a collection of more than 50 handpicked icebreakers sorted by group size and icebreaker type. The downside: you cannot copy and paste the text directly from the website although the content is completely free to use.
Trainers’ Lounge is another site offering free access to training activities, training materials, and many other useful resources for trainers.
Apart from the platforms introduced above, there are several established portals in the industry - such as Fenman or GlassTap - with a large database of reviewed and quality assured training materials, but with paid access.
BONUS #1: Video sharing channels
As far as video sharing goes, YouTube has become the ultimate source to go to in almost every field. You can find a wide array of videos on different topics (e.g. teamwork and collaboration videos) that can be used in your training, giving a good ground for a group discussion or debriefing. Also, you can watch plenty of icebreakers and energizers, and pick those that are most suitable to your training participants.
BONUS #2: Professional forums
Communities can be of great help in getting feedback or reviews for an idea, or in getting inspiration from other trainers. One example is the AnyAnswers section of TrainingZone with more than 5400 members. There are also plenty of active LinkedIn groups for trainers like:
Effective and Fun Training Techniques (60k members)
Training & Development (30k members)
Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group (180k members)
All these online resources are worth checking out. Hopefully, they will save your time and help you find new training exercises. Let us know in the comments if you missed something on the list.
Update
We are happy to see many of our readers suggesting additional useful resources, hurray for community wisdom! We are adding them here and we will keep this list updated. Don’t hesitate to comment if you have something to add:
41 exercises for various training topics from First Step Training
A few dozen Games and Icebreakers and some other Group Activities from Wilderdom
23 activities sorted into 8 different training topics on TrainingCourseMaterial.com. (additionally they offer paid full course packages as well)
More than two hundred free articles and resources to develop people and organisation on Nick Heap’s site. Among them you can find some exercises and games as well
Skillsconverged.com offers a range free training resources: 10 training exercises among many other useful templates
A big directory of different training exercises dumped into a library on Shurdington’s site. Due to the lack of descriptive information in the list it is not easy to find what you are looking forward, but you can download many exercises with detailed instructions.
A structured approach how to pick your icebreakers withing training settings and more than a dozen icebreaker exercises at Oak Innovation’s site.
We are reaching the end of 2014 - a year that brought big steps forward for TrainedOn, even if it felt like a big rollercoaster ride sometimes. Looking back at where have we been a year ago, we have a smile on our face when seeing regular user activity in TrainedOn and increased anticipation to build it further.
Behind the scenes the past year was almost entirely spent in remote working by our team, which brought new challenges to tackle. In this post we want to reflect on what have we achieved, and what have we learnt about the market and running our company.
At a glance:
TrainedOn has grown from almost zero to more than 600 users Europe-wide. We launched our private beta in January, and kept refining it until we opened for public in May.
We have shifted the business direction from building a platform with an online training material marketplace to focus on building a Software-as-a-Service application that helps trainers to get their work done effectively.
As we learnt more about what users valued about the product, we revamped our landing page to reflect on our core value proposition: TrainedOn liberates you in the process of planning a training - At the end of the day you will have more focus and energy left for the human interaction that enables learning to happen.
We introduced a pricing model that helps us building a sustainable business which can offer both free option for casual users as well as paid subscription for more demanding customers.
Most importantly we learned from our customers on the way, and understood that the core of our intuitive schedule builder tool is rather a nice-to-have at the moment. It was interesting to talk to trainers from various fields. We saw the different approaches to making training plans which taught us that having more knowledge about a training topic and making less of a bespoke training does not require so much planning and scheduling. This led us to realise that we need to support other parts of the trainer workflow to make TrainedOn really valuable for educators.
In the meantime we also received a lot of positive feedback, to highlight one of our first testimonial:
"TrainedOn cleansed training planning into a pure creative process: a real flow experience".
It often highlighted how the Training Planner makes the process of schedule building much easier and more pleasant to handle. Ultimately, this also made us wonder if other professions could be helped by a simple-to-use scheduling tool.
Behind the scenes, our teamwork certainly got more complicated after leaving the lively office of Startup Wise Guys in Tallinn. We learnt a lot about remote working, and - as remote working becomes a popular trend nowadays - we had great resources to seek inspiration from, like Basecamp or Groove.
In fact one the biggest challenge was to synchronize our work, since each of us was working only part-time for TrainedOn.
Overlapping in time and regular communication is critical, and the two main solutions that worked for us well were:
Dividing our team of 5 to two smaller teams: a customer and a product end, so the smaller teams could work organize themselves easier and maintain a more intense communication
Live meetings from time to time: we had two occasions when the whole team met live for a week, both to keep up the team spirit and to set a strategy for the upcoming period. Nevertheless in retrospect we learnt that meeting every 3-4 months and not later is critical to keep up the momentum within the team. Additionally it's been extremely useful to have an external facilitator who understands our team and business. We are grateful to Steve for helping as our advisor in 2014.
With each team member having other duties to fulfill while doing TrainedOn we were challenged to handle the different and varying level of our commitment. The dynamic equity adjustment method described in the Slicing the Pie book of Mike Moyer provided a well-functioning framework to keep a fair system to account for our investments (mostly time) necessary to build TrainedOn.
To counter the challenges, we were also lucky to have amazing people around us. We are grateful to all the people who offered us their help during the past year, everyone using TrainedOn to create training plans and providing valuable feedback, plenty of mentors and people generously offering their time, expertise and introductions to help us, as well as friends and family for their support.
Now that 2015 is standing at the door, we feel motivated to keep building TrainedOn by adding the features we learnt our users want, and make a leap so TrainedOn becomes the essential tool for supporting trainers in creating high-quality training.
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