Hi and welcome to facilitation 101, the next in our series of the art of getting stuff done. Okay, so I'm going to start this course out with the story of a freaked out first time facilitator. So this mini course really did come out of a real life experience that happened in the office just a couple weeks ago. So I had a colleague roll up to my desk and yes, literally rolled up. We've been open office, so rolled up to my desk in their chair, and in an anxious whisper, pleaded help. I got assigned, facilitating a session and to get my team to talk about our values.

So they were completely freaked out. Of course, I said, Don't worry, we got it. Take a deep breath. So ask for a copy of the agenda. We looked over together. And we jumped in thinking about goals, timing, and idea of prep time.

So we started outlining and just brainstorming some ideas, writing this all down on paper, and I look up and I see complete and sheer terror. All my colleagues face who says, I don't think I can facilitate this. will I do if they disagree or if people start freaking out? Or what if they get angry? So after explaining that running out of the room was definitely not a good plan A, we talked through a facilitation strategy. And this person really loves underscore star loves spreadsheets.

And I explained that, you know, brains work in a similar way of how spreadsheets organized that people really like categories, neatly placing things in clear buckets using labels. So you're going to revisit this analogy of the spreadsheet is kind of this context for thinking about facilitating. So with that, let's get started.