158 - Facilitation Beyond the Workshop with Marilyn Zakhour

What will the most successful teams look like in the future of work? How is consultancy changing? How can businesses improve their knowledge management and sharing?

Believe it or not, Marilyn Zakhour and I manage to fit all of these topics (and several more) into this episode.

Marilyn is a fascinating person - from her multi-hyphenate career to her ease of conversation.

Since 2020, when she left her role as Head of Dubai Opera, she has been working with top executives to help them step into the future of work and prioritise collaboration over co-location.

Our wide-ranging conversation about big ideas felt more like a casual chat with a friend - and there are plenty more seats at the table for you to join us.

Find out about:

• Why consultancy is increasingly about change and project management
• How the best remote teams embrace newness, rather than replicate tradition
• Why context is an essential precursor to outcomes in a workshop
• What happens when participant hear you use buzzwords and acronyms
• How Marilyn designs her workshop debriefs to encourage long-lasting behavioural change
• What great information management looks like in businesses (including facilitation ones!)

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Questions and Answers

Part one

[01:35] When did you start calling yourself a facilitator - in fact, do you?

[03:57] What's the switch been like between management and facilitation?

[09:24] How do you help clients bridge that gap between knowing and doing after a workshop?

[11:56] Do you find that all managers receive well the prompt that they've forgotten something?

[17:11] When do you determine that a project is finished? And when did your consulting business become an 'interim management' business?

[19:23] This sounds a lot like change management - would you say that's accurate?

[22:22] How many people affected by the outcome of a workshop can you legitimately include in said workshop? Isn't there a tipping point?

[25:44] What makes a workshop or project fail?

[27:19] What's the cost of a failed workshop?

[27:59] What would your advice be to a facilitator whose workshop has just failed?

Links

Cosmic Centaurs website

Cosmic Centaurs LinkedIn page

Aion Teams website

Connect to Marilyn:

On LinkedIn

Any thoughts? Share them with us!

Support the show

👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/  👈