The project has just concluded another combined Games night/ public workshop weekend, this time in Seattle. It was fabulous to connect with old friends like Nancy White, John Inman, and Michael Wolf, and as always, to meet new friends and users of Group Works! Kudos especially to Stephanie Ellis who travelled all the way from New Mexico just to attend the weekend’s events.
The Games night was as usual full of friendly competition, and much laughter. If you haven’t yet tried out some of the games that have been refined as a playful way to engage the deck, I really encourage you to check them out on the activities list on our website. Dave Pollard has been refining a growing set of possibilities, mostly modeled after common games such as Charades, Pictionary, "Apples to Apples.” “Best Fit” is a perennial favorite as well. If you’re having a bunch of tending toward process geek or nerd friends over for an evening, try something a little different by pulling out a deck. Alternately, if you are facilitating an all day or multi day event and need a playful respite, try one of these in that lull after lunch to get folks moving around and embodying learnings about effective group work.
In the all day workshop we continued with old standbys— like the full group serving as consultant to one person’s approaching dilemma, with each of nine small groups using the patterns of one category, but we also continued to weave in new segments. For example, Dave had the group in teams of three have each person do an "organizational assessment" of their home reference group just using the nine new category cards to find 1-2 areas of particular strength and 1-2 areas that most need development. Or one of Tree Bressen’s new...
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