“It was one of the most memorable days of my life. Many other people said the same thing 💜. You all prepared our team so well, flawless. Cannot thank you enough and excited to debrief.”
I shared this client feedback with a friend, who suggested crocheting the feedback and hanging it on the wall.
We’re sharing this feedback not in the hopes of doing a humble brag, but to right out celebrate the good work that co-creation can make happen. Okay, and maybe brag a little.
Moxie partnered with Odetta, an international company that hires highly qualified women in developing economies, for flexible remote employment and work opportunities with a diverse, global client portfolio.
“Odetta is an online work platform that delivers high-end business process outsourcing to technology companies like Google.” - Katharine Wolf, CEO
Odetta freelancers are spread across the globe, in countries such as the UAE, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine. The name “Odetta” originated in France and means wealth. Katharine likes to think of Odetta as a company that "brings a wealth of opportunities and connections to the women on the team.”
Challenge
Katharine reached out to Moxie as it was time for the Odetta team in Pakistan to come together for their first in-person retreat and further develop their company culture. As CEO, she could have gone the typical route with a top-down approach: design and facilitate the retreat herself. Yet, Odetta is all about affirming women’s knowledge and skills. Moxie is all about drawing on the expertise that already exists within companies. Teaming up meant having the employees (aka Odettians) design and facilitate the retreat. Moxie facilitated sessions on developing the retreat agenda and trained the team in essential skills on facilitation.
Katharine wanted her team members to build an agenda to address the challenges they faced and to develop their facilitation skills along the way.
Throughout the collaboration, Moxie worked with five Odettians from roles across seniority and department to understand the company's top challenges, define the retreat's purpose, create the slides, and train the team to facilitate the retreat.
Initial sessions focused on developing and understanding the purpose of the retreat. Part of the preparation was creating a space for the team to comfortably share their ideas and concerns. The remaining sessions were dedicated to developing the retreat agenda. This was an interactive process where the facilitation team worked together to create and align the agenda and activities to the purpose.
And after all the hard work put into the process, it was finally the big day of the retreat.
Over 40 Odettians from all over Pakistan gathered for the two-day company retreat in Islamabad. In a post-retreat debrief session, we met with the facilitator team to hear their takeaways.
Six lessons on facilitation:
1. How to adapt and use Chat GPT as a facilitation tool:
One main lesson was knowing when to adapt, respond to the group’s needs, add in energizers, and think on their feet.
“I learned that nothing is going to be as per our plans. So we have to be very hands on facilitators [...] the one thing that I learned was adaptation.” - Odettian facilitator
“I would say they wanted to have more and more of those activities [energizers]. And there was a time when we had to, like, chat GPT there, and then to fill in those moments of buffer, because there were, like, a few activities that ended before time as well.” - Odettian facilitator
We love the way this team thought on their feet and called on ChatGPT to come up with inspiration for more energizers in the moment.
2. How to adapt to the energy levels when people get writing or sharing fatigue:
Especially over a two-day retreat, participants can get weary of consistently brainstorming, inputting ideas and questions, and at some points, they just want to have fun.
“[...] everybody was coming to us, okay, what's going to happen next? [...] Are there more activities, or are we just going to write down things and then think about things? We don't want to do the thinking part now. We want to have fun now.” - Odettian facilitator
When is the best time to have an energizer? How many do you need for a one-day workshop? Our advice is to pay attention to what participants need and adapt. This facilitation team did a fantastic job adapting to the shifting time and listening to people’s energy levels.
3. Power of skits for sharing challenges & prototyping new ideas:
Participants were asked to prepare skits in small groups to present real-life challenges they faced in their work and to share ideas for addressing those challenges. The facilitation team noted the skits helped team members see that the challenges they experienced were actually common across the organization.
“And watching people create, skits was actually like, there were so many things that I thought, they're just in my head but then I was like, oh my god, everybody notices [...] So knowing that we're all on the same page no matter what our job roles are, and we all have similar problems [...] I think that worked well for everyone, for me, at least, to know that everybody else is on the same page as well.” - Odettian facilitator
Skits and other theatrical methods can be helpful for teams to express known challenges to an organization. It helps the group step out of normal patterns of communication as participants can “step into character” to share challenges or ideas.
4. Surprise at people’s engagement level: Will the participants engage?
No matter how prepared one feels as a facilitator, it can be tricky to predict how engaged participants might be.
“When we used to have our internal preparation meetings [....]we used to say, who is going to come up and speak and who is going to express their feelings, we were not pretty confident about that, but they [retreat participants] were amazing. Everybody had a lot to say. So that was, like unbelievable. They came up with skits, with suggestions, problems, and issues. I remember a girl even came up for a dance exercise or something like that. So they were pretty confident, and they were very vocal.” - Odettian facilitator
“Give us more time. Give us more time we want to prepare this and prepare that. And we were like, really, this is happening. They're [retreat participants] enjoying it?” - Odettian facilitator
The participants met face-to-face for the first time in this workshop. Even eager groups hesitate to engage at first. As facilitators, our anxiety about participation can make us change course too quickly—altering activities or talking more when we should aim to connect the group. The pre-worry that Odettian facilitators experienced is something facilitators go through no matter how many workshops.
5. Documenting the learnings and what needs to be captured:
Figuring out what and how much you need to document from the experience is always a learning process for a facilitation team. In the beginning, facilitators often think they need to capture every idea and reflection to make sure none of the gold is lost. Yet facilitators soon realize that 40-plus participants can create a lot of ideas in a short amount of time.
“They were writing on like five different papers, and I have a lot of them now. They are not useful for me.” - Odettian facilitator
How do you capture the magic of what happens in a retreat? While documenting a synthesized version of ideas can be effective, some learnings can’t necessarily be captured in note-taking or video recordings. The learning is embodied in the individuals who participated and is shown when subsequent interactions and rituals start to change.
6. Learning how to facilitate as a team:
For this group, their learnings were not only about their facilitation style but also their style in concert with the rest of the facilitator team.
“So at the start, I was like, you know, a little panicked, and I had to go to Tayyaba, and she was the one who was like, you know, patient and calm. [...] So she was like, my comfort, and I have to go to her for that, that now. She was like, you know, we'll manage it.” - Amina, Odettian Facilitator
“Amina is a person who can engage people well. Like there's no awkward silence. So she's always saying something and making sure that people are engaged. So I don't think that I will ever have this kind of skill, but Amina is, like, pretty great at this.” - Tayyaba, Odettian Facilitator
Everybody on the facilitation team brought different skill sets, and the team learned about their own facilitation style by facilitating together. Some individuals were hosts and liked to keep the audience engaged, whereas others tended to be a source of calm in stressful times due to last-minute changes or glitches.
Coming out of the retreat, the Odettians shared they developed new relationships and gave air to challenges and opportunities within the organization. As much as the retreat fostered human connection, it renewed a sense of purpose to continue working together.
“We have hugged each other, we have felt each other's warmth. So it's like we're talking to friends today.” - Odettian Facilitator
As for the stellar facilitators, who worked under a time crunch to develop and facilitate a retreat while juggling other responsibilities, our hats are off to you. During the debrief, one of the facilitators asked: “So we are true facilitators?”
And the answer is a resounding Yes!
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