iFacile was very much ahead of its time in promoting and developing Virtual Facilitative Leadership Skills over a decade ago. Its training programme equipped managers to use virtual meetings to radically improve engagement and participation of their people – even more than is possible in physical meetings. Large sections of our Meeting Toolchest is developed from iFacile resources.The courses were developed by Mike Clargo and built around Microsoft’s LiveMeeting software – a technology that in many ways was 20 years ahead of its time.
The following 10-minute video illustrates both the philosophy and the approach. Despite the core material within it being written 10 years ago, it is still a long way ahead of current practice in all but the most advanced organisations. The Pandemic has done something to close the gap, but there is still a lot more that can be done to make virtual meetings better than their physical counterparts.
iFacile made the bet that LiveMeeting’s advanced software would be around for a long time, but we were wrong. Being so much in advance of user behaviour meant that a lot of the functionality was not utilised, and so when Microsoft needed to redevelop the platforms on which it ran, much of that functionality was withdrawn. The result was Teams – more focused and trimmed back to what users wanted, and able to work easily on a wide range of devices.
Unfortunately, the new functionality delivered very little of what iFacile was training people to use. Furthermore, the training materials and examples themselves were heavily invested in LiveMeeting graphics and imagery. As a result, iFacile suspended its programmes back in 2012.
It has taken another 6 years for the meeting and whiteboard technologies available in LiveMeeting ten years earlier to return in products such as Teams, Zoom, Conceptboard and Mural. But they have.
As a result, we have reviewed the original iFacile programmes and ideas. Rewritten them to bring them up to date, and to exploit the latest thinking. And (learning our lesson from a decade previously) made them technology agnostic. The result is illustrated, in part, in the following video:
Our new five-day course realises iFacile’s original vision and equips people with the skills and understanding they need to design and facilitate highly participative remote meetings. For more information, contact us.