Inclusive Facilitation with Shaheen Hajira

Transcript

Full transcript, edited for readability. Every timestamp jumps the video to that moment.

Shaheen Hajira: People process knowledge in different ways. I might process better when I write, and I actually do process better when I write, hence my long LinkedIn posts. Some people process their thoughts when they speak. And so they might turn to the person next to them, and as they share they go, yeah, that's what I meant, this is brilliant. And you build on that. But I think it's exactly to your point, you kind of touched on why I do this work. It's because I think there's so much brilliance in the rooms that we're in, but we just miss it, because we haven't designed it properly. And if we gave people options and choice and autonomy, it just means that we can uplift all of those beautiful ideas that people have but have not had a way to bring out, because of the systems and the processes that we had, that favoured a certain kind of thinking and talking and doing. Tobi: Have you ever asked a question during group facilitation and always got the same two people who raised their hands? Everybody else at this point in the workshop is still thinking, and by the time they know what they want to say, the conversation has already moved on. This is a design choice, says my guest today, Shaheen Hajira. We just stopped noticing that we are making it. She's a facilitator and inclusive learning designer, and the founder of Taleem Consulting in Sydney. She co-designs solutions together with communities who rarely get asked, and she trains facilitators in inclusive facilitation. The question on today's episode is simple: what do we actually change in the way we facilitate a session, so we can get all the knowledge that's in the room out there? So we talk about why learning happens in context and connection, not only in the content, what is wrong with raising hands and speaking, and what you can do instead. And we unpack the email she sends out before every single workshop. We look at her POWER framework, five lenses she puts on any agenda, and what trauma-informed facilitation looks like in an ordinary session. And in the end she even takes apart one of our own metaFox warm-up exercises. So let's see how that goes, and get started. Tobi: You are a facilitator and learning designer. And when preparing for today, and listening a bit to what you said on other occasions, I heard you say that we as a facilitator community need to move from learning content to learning in context and in connection. Can you explain that a bit?