Toolchest Articles – Better online meetings

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Brainwriting: A Structured Approach to Inclusive Ideation

Discover how brainwriting fosters inclusive ideation by letting every participant share their ideas independently, ensuring a diversity of voices. – – – – – – ...
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Facilitator Cards – an easy way to start facilitation

Facilitation cards are simple, fun way to step into facilitation and to bring more activity and participation into your meetings – – – – – ...
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Meeting tools and sticky notes are not an alternative to dialogue

Contrary to what some may believe, meeting tools and sticky notes are not a replacement for dialogue. The purpose of using these tools is not ...
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Rules for Effective Teamwork

Work with your team to develop the basis for more effective relationships and interactions – – – – – – – – – – – ...
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More advanced whiteboards

Where do you go next when you have whiteboard enthusiasm but have outgrown Google Jamboard? – – – – – – – – – – ...
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Why Google Jamboard?

Google Jamboard is simple, intuitive and easy to use. It is therefore a great way to get your people started – here’s how! – – ...
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Meeting is a verb!

Should we ban meetings? Probably Should we ban meeting? Never! We tend to understand the word ‘meetings’ as a noun. When we use the word, ...
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Stress resilience and mental health: Making stress healthy and productive

As the rate of change and complexity grows, mental health at work is in decline. We need to build stress resilience into our working practices ...
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Structure complexity – using Design Thinking to help navigate complexity

Design thinking provides tools and solutions to help structure complexity and present it in a way that best utilises the human brain. This article is ...
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Encourage creativity solutions to stress

Creativity solutions to stress are more than just ideas – the very exercise of being creative can help resolve tensions. The ideas help too! This ...
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Inspirational meetings are a journey of empowerment

Meetings are a vital and powerful tool for transforming the negative effects of stress into positive energy and excitement This article is part of our ...
Facilitate healthy environments

Facilitate healthy environments

Use facilitative approaches to nurture supportive relationships. These make success more likely and reduce the stress of conflict and criticism. This article is part of ...
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Use Practice Zone thinking to build confidence

Use Practice Zone thinking to develop skills and insights in people ahead of when they are needed. This helps build competence and confidence ahead of ...
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Embrace failure, feedback and a learning culture

Learning cultures are key to avoiding an overload of stress as we face greater levels of change. Key to making them work is embracing failure ...
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Inspire people to engage their spiritual potential

Mental health issues challenge who we are – they question our identity. If we can help people better access the things that make them fully ...
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Strategy Engagement Matrix

The Strategy Engagement Matrix is the most powerful tool in existence for developing and engaging your people in a winning strategy – – – – ...
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How design thinking transforms the strategic planning process

25 years on from when engineers adapted a strategic design tool and applied it to organisation design, it is still the best strategic planning tool ...
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Experimenting with the disabling nature of stress

A simple demonstration There is a mean little demonstration we used to use with our Youth Group to illustrate how the mind works. We would ...
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Inviting a Virtual Customer to your next online meeting

How different would meetings in your organisation be if a customer was present in each one? What proportion of your meetings would lead to a ...
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Creating Online Spaces for Spiritual Retreat

In the UK we are blessed with so many beautiful places where we can can go and gaze, and wonder, and connect with something much ...
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Do virtual meetings support diversity?

Diversity is a hot topic. What initially began as an ethical, and then a legal issue, is fast becoming a creative and competitive one. Organisations ...
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Six easy ways to increase participation in your next virtual meeting

Keeping everyone fully engaged during meetings has always been a challenge. With the sudden increase in work from home and the use of tools like ...
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4 good reasons keep your webcam on

Why does Teams focus on the faces of the most vociferous and active participants in a meeting? Why does Adam Grant report studies of determining ...
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AMRC Use Lockdown For Strategic Rethink

I was speaking to a friend of mine at the weekend about how he has been using the COVID-19 hiatus to rethink his organisation’s strategy ...