New (Free) E-Book: Leading Systems Change Will Supercharge Your Facilitation Skills

My colleagues, Heather McLeod Grant and Adene Sacks, have just published a new workbook called “Leading Systems Change.” The book describes a  new approach to leadership and community engagement in the Central Valley, that has empowered local leaders to tackle a host of issues facing the community in an entirely new way–from designing education programs and services for immigrant communities to law enforcement reform, and boosting entrepreneurship in the region. Overall, the program led to over 100 collaborations and its impact is ongoing.
But this is more than a simple report on a highly successful leadership program that takes a systems approach to serving an underserved community, it is the authors playbook of how to design and implement a program, including facilitation recipes for designing meetings.
When I design and facilitate meeting for clients, board meetings, or as part of a workshop, webinar or other training, I’m always looking for new ideas for facilitation and interactive processes. That’s why I’ve keep a good list of meeting facilitation playbooks such as Leading Systems Change handy for inspiration.

1. 1. 1. 1. Emerging Leaders Playbook Toolkit-The toolkit includes highly practical meeting facilitation “recipes” to help build skills in managing self, teams, and organizational culture.The facilitator agendas are designed for beginner or novice facilitators. –
         2. Sharing Knowledge Wiki-This wiki was created by The ICT-KM group of the CGIAR and other partners to catalog and document processes for nonprofits that want to share knowledge across partners doing development work. The facilitation methods are participatory. Each method provides step-by-ste instructions, examples, templates, and additional reading links.
         3. MindTools Team Management Tools -Mindtools is a robust collection of resources to increase productivity, improve management and leadership skills, and support organizational development initiatives. This section includes templates for meeting processes.
         4. Teampedia-This collection includes many useful team building activities, icebreakers, teamwork resources, and tools for teams that want to improve their collaborative processes, including meetings.
         5. HyperIsland-Hyper Island is a creative business school in Sweden with a unique approach to learning that focuses on collaboration, creativity, and learning-by-doing. The toolkit includes easy methods for any team that wants to improve collaboration and creativity.
         6. Sessionlab-This resource collection of well-annotated facilitator plans for meetings and training is part of a software tool that helps facilitator’s create and document their processes.
         7. Lucid Meeting Agenda Templates-Lucid Meeting is a collaboration and meeting platform. The template library consists of facilitator agendas for a wide range of meeting types.There is also a useful section of virtual meeting templates.
         8. IAF Methods Database-The IAF Methods Database is the mother of all facilitator resource collections for professional or highly skilled facilitators.
         9. Innovating for People Handbook: Design Thinking Methods: A recipe book of human-centered design methods. Check out their online platform, Luma Workplace, where you can read articles, download templates, and watch instructional videos.
         10. Mural:  This is an online visual collaboration tool, but it is embedded with innovation facilitation methods, including Luma (see #9).
         11. Gamestorming: From my colleague David Gray, this is a recipe book for creating innovative new ideas
         12. Liberating Structures: My colleagues Nancy White and Kyla Shawyer introduced me to this participatory approach to facilitation.
         13. Collection of Nonprofit Design Thinking Playbooks This blog post profiles different nonprofit design thinking toolkits.
         14. Design Sprint Community:  Recipes and templates for agile design.

         If you facilitate meetings, trainings, or convenings, what playbooks are missing from this list?