Aug 9, 2022
In today’s episode, Pilar talks to Myriam Hadnes, facilitator and host of the Workshops Work podcast and founder of the Never Done Before festival.
Myriam first realised she was a
facilitator after she read Priay Parker’s "The Art of Gathering".
Her perception of facilitation has broadened since then: she now
thinks more of having the mindset of a facilitator as she’s doing
less and less pure facilitation, and more training and nurturing of
facilitators.
Maybe it’s more a question of identity and how
you do what you do eg in a conversation, being present, listening,
making sure the other person is heard etc.
Myriam has created a home for facilitators. The
Never Done Before festival grew out of a feeling that there was
nothing new in the events that Myriam attended. In 2020, Myriam set
up the festival, online, with the only “rule” that those leading
sessions had to do something they hadn’t done before. She invited
previous podcast guests to run sessions.
The
festival went on for 24 hours and everything that could go wrong,
went wrong!
However, there’s a beauty about creating a
space for a group into a session that might fail, because it’s
never done before. It creates a strong sense of connection.
(And there was even some impromptu singing at some point, sparked
by some things going wrong…)
There was even an “afterglow”, later in the year when some of the
facilitators repeated their sessions.
A participant suggested an “advent calendar” type event to follow
up the festival. Everyone who had run a workshop could run the
session again under the label “Done only once before”. The ongoing
experience of meeting every day brought people even closer
together.
Two years on, the community is becoming
stronger and doesn’t need Myriam to curate and do everything for
them, but provide the ecosystem and “give permission”. They have
just run The Testival, a testing festival, 100% co-created by the
community.
For the next Never Been Done
Before festival, it will be the community that organises the event,
which feels strange to Myriam. She’s going through similar stages to giving
birth and bringing up children, and it’s an emotional process. To
hold a space safe enough for everyone to take risks and show
unpolished work to other facilitators is Myriam’s main role
now.
They’re now in the process of thinking about
who else can join in, at the same time as protecting the community.
Inclusivity (eg global) while being exclusive (eg it’s a paid
community) is a difficult balance to strike. One of the ways in
which they’re addressing this is through adjusting the price to
purchasing power, so the price varies depending on where you are in
the world.
21.30mins
The
community also has a mentorship programme. They have adapted the
Hero’s Journey as a development programme for new facilitators, and
it ends with mentees running a session in the festival. The next
intake is in September 2022.
They have two homes online: one for asynchronous communication, and they also have a community garden on Welo https://www.welo.space/. This space is open all the time, for people to hop in, meet others, and even run their own sessions.
Creating the habit for people to use this space has been interesting. First they called it a co-working space, but very few people would drop in. It finally kicked off when they started to schedule sessions there, and rename it to and design it as a “community garden”.
28.00mins
Myriam realised that the facilitator community
shares everything, except their fees. She also noticed that many
struggle to price their services. She hosted a mastermind session
for the NDB community and realised how good it felt to have an open
conversation about money. Someone suggested carrying out a survey -
mainly whether there was a difference between what people charged
online vs in person.
The results: at the beginning of the pandemic, many clients expected online events to be cheaper than in person, or even free - now this has changed, and the rates are more or less the same (sometimes online is more expensive). Geographically, the rates in the US are higher than everywhere else.
Now that the world has woken up to the power of facilitation, and understands the value of a well facilitated workshops, the overall rates seem to have gone up. Value is a much better parameter to cost around than hours.
Myriam believes you can actually
go deeper when you run sessions in the online world, because
breakout rooms are truly private spaces, rather than the group work
done in person, where many groups still share the same physical
space in practice.
As facilitators, we need a mindset shift: clients don’t want a “workshop”, they want specific outputs. (And will these be achieved with one workshop?)
Myriam hosts a show called
“Workshops Work”, and she’s now past the 170 episodes. https://workshops.work/podcast/
If you would like to guest on Myriam’s show, she is now looking for
“the edges”, what is a different angle on workshops? What have
workshop leaders learned from their career before running
workshops, that they bring to the work?
Myriam holds a chemistry call with potential
guests, where she assesses whether she and the person “click”, and
whether there is enough “flesh” - the moment Myriam gets curious
and the questions start coming to her, that’s where the chemistry
call ends, and the recording date is set.
(And
if you want to find out more about Myriam as a podcaster, check out
this conversation in Adventures in Podcasting:
https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/ep-21-adventures-with-myriam-hadnes/
)
The next Never Been Done Before festival will run on 18 Nov 2022. https://neverdonebefore.org/