Powerful Facilitation, Gratitude, and Scrum Guide 2020

While an attitude of gratitude promotes more powerful facilitation, you won’t hear the term ‘happy’ very often in one of our meetings, sessions, or workshops, as the word is both subjective and fuzzy.

Yet a positive attitude, such as an attitude of gratitude, is a leading indicator of powerful facilitation and the opportunity to galvanize consensus.  The bottom line is—groups with more gratitude are more likely to agree, and to agree quickly! So while an attitude of gratitude extends far beyond powerful facilitation, it seems appropriate, and useful, to provide a quick reflection during this holiday season in particular. 

Gratitude vs. Mandate

Of interest are the following trend lines extracted from Google’s Ngram. As the use of the term ‘mandate’ has increased in recent decades, the use of the term ‘gratitude’ has decreased. While the relationship is a correlation and not causal, it does indicate that people have less gratitude today than in the past, as frequency of the term “gratitude” (and reference to its positive meaning) has been on the decline.

An Attitude of Gratitude

An Attitude of Gratitude Has Been Declining

Gratitude vs. Facilitation

However, there has been a recent uptick in the use of the term ‘gratitude’ since 1990, correlating with an increase in use of the term ‘facilitation.’ Although the use of the term facilitation, in a business sense, is relatively new, since we started teaching facilitation there has been a noticeable and positive slope increase in the use of the term ‘gratitude.’ Not coincidentally, we would argue.

Gratitude - Facilitation

An Uptick of Gratitude Correlates with Facilitation

How Does Gratitude Promote Powerful Facilitation?

By encouraging your group to be thankful for what they have, rather than dwelling on what they do not have, you’re encouraging them to focus on what they have (eg, skills, strengths, etc.) and on what they can do. People respond to a meaningful challenge, and powerful facilitation will fortify their gratitude for what they have and what they have accomplished.

You will benefit personally as well. Harvard Medical School reports that…

“In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” (emphasis is ours)

People in the United States take so much for granted that our attitude can make outsiders incredulous. Less than one percent of the people on this planet have some money in the bank, a few coins in their purse, a stocked refrigerator at home, the skill to read, at least one parent who remains alive, AND the liberty to attend a place of worship of their choosing. Yet rather than gratitude, many Americans take these freedoms and benefits for granted.

If you exude a sense of gratitude, then your meeting participants will empathize. For powerful facilitation, begin your meeting or workshop by first stressing the gratitude for an opportunity to make things better for your business and its stakeholders.  Most people are not so fortunate. So be glad, not mad.

Let’s Be Thankful — Where We Are Winning

Using a Delphi panel and research method lasting over 15 years, the Millennium Project identified hundreds of indicators of humanity’s progress or regress. Since you are no doubt exposed to many of the negative factors by reading or listening to the “news”, consider these following vectors as positive, documented further by the World Future Society. Humanity is experiencing substantial increases with . . .

  • Access to clean water (percentage of people with)

    gratitude makes for power facilitation

    Powerful Facilitation Equals Servant Leadership

  • Adult literacy rate
  • Enrollment in secondary school (percentage of people)
  • GDP per capita
  • GDP per unit of energy consumption
  • HIV prevalence among all age groups (decreasing)
  • Infant mortality rates (reduction)
  • Internet access and use
  • Life expectancy
  • Physicians and health care workers per 1,000 people
  • Research and development expenditures (percentage of national budgets)
  • Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries
  • Undernourishment
  • Women in parliamentary governments (percentage of)

So be glad, not sad.

Scrum Guide 2020 and Considerations Providing and Participating in Training

For the first time in fifteen years Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland have updated The Scrum Guide (The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game), which you can now download HERE. The result is crisper and clearer than the original, and we are providing the link to you as a benefit of being in our community. Please remember as you seek additional training in 2021 and when budgets are tight, the following:

Seek knowledge, not degrees.

An MBA provides general management knowledge, but not the specific knowledge required for immediate implementation. Focused topical training such as HOW TO LEAD BETTER MEETINGS, provides a quicker return on investment and can be applied immediately after successfully completing the curriculum.

Value Outside Experts.

There is no substitute for quality interaction with expert instructors. If you hire from outside, you can call upon training as you need it, rather than require full-time staff for every business topic.

Seek Knowledge not Degrees

Seek Knowledge, Not Degrees

Provide feedback.

Mentoring has a tremendous impact within organizations, so ensure that your employees get the feedback they need to take the training they need most. Strive for impact — powerful and immediate. Every person has opportunities to leverage strengths and shore up weaknesses. They don’t always prioritize them correctly, however. Depend on a mentor or an outsider (eg, coach) who can provide honest, neutral feedback. Always default to leveraging strengths and improving core competencies over patching up weaknesses.

Make it easy.

If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right. Consider hosting private classes that pull together teams and help develop esprit de corps (ie, teamwork) that amplifies and compliments individual learning. Effective training provides physical, emotional, and intellectual relief. When budgets are tight and work demands per employee productivity increases, do not forget the importance of your people’s needs and the opportunity for win-win by providing them with effective training on immediately relevant topics.

10 Excellent Guidelines for Students and Teachers: Justice, Peace, and Delight

We had to share Sr Corita Kent’s ten rules below, especially Rule Eight. In 1968, she crafted the lovely, touching Ten Rules for Students and Teachers for a class project. Since most of us play many roles in life, all of us at one time or another are student, teacher, parent, child, etc, we thought you would appreciate them as well. Her ten superb guidelines include:

10 Excellent Guidelines for Students and Teachers: Justice, Peace, and Delight

Sr Corita Kent

  1. Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
  2. General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
  3. General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
  4. Consider everything an experiment.
  5. Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
  6. Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
  7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
  8. Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
  9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
  10. We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules.

HINTS:

  • Always be around.
  • Come or go to everything.
  • Always go to classes.
  • Read anything you can get your hands on.
  • Look at movies carefully, often.
  • Save everything, it might come in handy later.

As an unlikely ‘regular’ in the Los Angeles art scene, Sister Corita Kent was an instructor at Immaculate Heart College and a celebrated artist who considered Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller, and John Cage to be personal friends.

John Cage, was an avant-garde musical composer who inspired Sister Corita Kent. While quoted frequently for Rule #10, Cage did not develop the list, as some website sites claim. By all accounts, though, John Cage marveled at the list.

Be glad.

And finally, a large portion of the world celebrates holidays around December. Since one traditional greeting in the English language is “Merry Christmas”, it begs the question, HOW.

While the thought may be genuine, and the words rich with historical precedence, HOW DOES a facilitator go about making today (and tomorrow) merry? The solution begins with attitude, and letting go of our own egos will positively impact attitudes that shape our behavior. How do you do that?

We began this article stressing an attitude of gratitude. For ‘letting go’, follow the sage advice of Mother Teresa’s Holiday Message below and you will find it a lot easier. After all, she facilitated nourishment for tens of thousands of people by simply being of service.

Mother Teresa’s Holiday Message of Prescribed Actions and Behaviours - Gratitude helps

Removing the Weight of the World

Holiday Message – Letting Go

Treat today as if you won’t exist tomorrow. 
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;

Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;

Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, there may be jealousy;

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;

It was never between you and them anyway.

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Don’t ruin your career or reputation with bad meetings. Register Now for a class or forward this to someone who should. Taught by world-class instructors, MG RUSH professional facilitation curriculum focuses on practice. Each student thoroughly practices and rehearses tools, methods, and approaches throughout the week. While some call this immersion, we call it the road to building impactful facilitation skills. #meetingresults

Our courses also provide an excellent way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International®, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See individual class descriptions for details.) #facilitationtraining

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