Last year I had the opportunity to serve on a National Academy of Sciences committee. We were chartered to help NASA improve its innovation ecosystem, a truly awesome experience. One of my main contributions was to lead several Premortem sessions, where participants...

We’ve all been in meetings where one person talks too much, haven’t we? As facilitators, this can be a challenging situation to manage. On the one hand, we want to honor each person’s contribution and willingness to participate. Shutting someone down can have a...

Our Story From Last Week Continues…  Day Two: Brainstorming and Prioritizing Actions At the end of the first day, the facilitation team met and affinitized the feedback we’d heard, grouping it into topics for the next day. Our intent was to form the participants into...

Today's post is the first in a series by guest bloggers Alex Feinman (with Tom Seibert and Tammy Freeman)  Sometimes, you have to mix and match methods to get the results you need. This story is example of how important it is to be able to modify and adapt the plan in...

I often say the best thing Team Toolkit ever built was... the team itself.  Team Toolkit operates with a collaborative structure where each member has a lot of room to use their strengths, to support each other, and to have fun doing it. It's a very low-ego...

The TRIZ Prism tool is a powerful way to unlock a team's creativity and discover new solutions to difficult problems. It's a pretty straightforward practice to describe, but actually doing it can be a little trickier than it looks at first. The Elephant-And-Straw...