Empowering Leaders For Sustainable Change

A conversation with Eddie Jjemba, Urban Resilience Advisor, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

“We need facilitators to create that room. There are very few and the scientists who are quite enthusiastic as well as the decision leaders, what they know right now is PowerPoint one PowerPoint after another. And which is quite boring but they don’t know what to do, how different, what other ways can we do it, can we pass on this information? Any sector that you talk about within Africa, they will need that, they will need facilitators because of the growth trajectory that we are looking at and the change that we need to bring about.”- Eddie Jjemba

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Eddie Jumper from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. Eddie discusses his work in making African cities resilient to climate change and his journey into environmental education. He shares his experiences in facilitation, including the importance of adapting to diverse cultures and contexts. Eddie also talks about the financial barriers to facilitation training in Africa and how the Red Cross is addressing this issue. The conversation also covers the use of games in facilitation, the process of designing meeting agendas, and the future of facilitation in the context of climate change.

Show Highlights

[00:10:28] The importance of facilitation in the African context

[00:15:09] The need for facilitators in addressing climate change impacts 

[00:21:05] The use of games in facilitation

[00:25:15] Understanding cultural diversity in facilitation

[00:35:18] Embracing Facilitation at the Mid-level Management 

[00:37:01] Qualities of Senior Leaders Ready for Facilitation

[00:38:46] The impact of facilitation on meetings and gatherings

Links | Resources

Eddie on Linkedin

Eddie on Twitter

Eddie on Voltage Control

About the Guest

Eddie brings over a decade of dedication to tackling climate-related challenges, with a primary focus on climate change adaptation and disaster risk management. In his role as a Climate Change Advisor, he has actively facilitated workshops and conferences, demonstrating his commitment to both urban and rural areas. His expertise lies in developing practical strategies through collaboration with a diverse group of stakeholders, including practitioners, academics, and representatives from both the private and government sectors.

Eddie’s skills are not just limited to strategy development; he also excels in facilitating learning and effectively communicating climate risk management to a wide array of audiences, ranging from specialists in the field to the general public. His specialties include Climate Change Adaptation, Disaster Risk Management, and effective Risk Communication, along with a deep understanding of both policy and practice in these critical areas. His work has consistently showcased his ability to translate complex climate issues into actionable strategies, making him a valuable asset in the field of climate resilience.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today I’m with Eddie Jjemba at Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, where he offers advice to make cities in Africa resilient to climate change shocks and stresses. Welcome to show, Eddie.

Eddie Jjemba:

Thank you very much, Douglas. Very pleased to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so great to have you. Well, as usual, let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start in this work. I know that you had early ambitions to be a medical doctor, and that formed some of your thinking and some of your choices in your journey, but I’d love to talk about that with you today.

Eddie Jjemba:

Yeah, well, having been raised in a family where it was very important or it was known that anyone who is bright or who is able to pass science should automatically sign up to be a medical doctor. It was quite prestigious to be one. I had a couple of uncles who had gone ahead of me, so they were medical doctors, peers who were aspiring to be, and as someone who was performing well in science, everyone expected me to be a medical doctor, and I myself actually wanted to be a medical doctor. Well, because of financial circumstances… Number one, I couldn’t have fought to pay for the medical course at the university, and the government sponsored me for an alternative course, which was conservation biology. Well, because it was also science, I loved it. I chose to move on with a conservation biology course.

In there, among the many things that we studied was environmental education. And that caught my attention and I started following it a little bit, I mean with hesitation, but also with interest. Yes. So that became a line that eventually would land me my first job in a local small organization. We’re about, what, seven people working for it and my role there was an environmental educator. Those were the initial steps into the world of facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:

And what was it about childhood education that really attracted you?

Eddie Jjemba:

Okay, naturally, I love children. I do. Anywhere you find me, you’ll find children somehow come around me. I am also, or at least I’ve been called playful. I now admit I enjoy playing. And in the African culture, playfulness is reserved for children. So I think I often find myself playing with the children. So that’s exactly how I gravitated towards children. I loved children. Oh, I was told that my father actually used to love children, that he would have children all around him. Early in my early childhood I had that. So probably that too influenced my inclination to children.

Douglas Ferguson:

And how do you think that impacts your work today? This kind of playfulness, this kind interest in children, this kind affinity to think and behave in those ways?

Eddie Jjemba:

So I remember one day, okay, as an environment educator responsible for teaching children to love nature and conservation in general, one day in my local organization, we received an invitation to go for games for climate. My manager at the time, she basically frowned at the invitation. She was wondering who on earth does playfulness instead of doing serious business, anyway. That was the first time I think I got exposed to playfulness in a professional sense. Now, coming back here, I realized that actually my facilitation style edges around seriousness and playfulness and a little bit of comedy and storytelling. So the interaction with children and the love for playfulness, I have learned to bring it into a room, whether it’s a meeting, a smaller one, big conferences, and I find that people connect, actually, it’s my way of connecting with the audience before we get into this too much business of life with whatever topics that we are addressing.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m really curious, you talk about bringing into play and the comedy and connecting with the audience, is there a story that comes to mind of how that happens?

Eddie Jjemba:

Well, I’m trying to dig into my mind, what the immediate thing that comes is imagine myself in my work, I tend to move around the cities, especially in Africa. And one of the most memorable time that I have is when I was in Windhoek, in Namibia, in a huge conference hall in there with politicians. The mayor is present, the councilor is present there, technical people from disaster risk management. Because of the work we do, which is humanitarian work, we always want to bring along local people. So the common man and woman community members basically. And we’re thinking about the climate change strategy for the city of Windhoek. It’s not time for soliciting for votes, getting the mayor to talk with the local community leaders and just a local dweller of informal settlements as we call them.

It’s challenging, so I often start with some very light joke maybe, very carefully selected, which makes people loosen up and laugh a bit. So for example, we are here to talk about the changing climate, but is it really changing? Has anyone seen it changing or something related to an African proverb? So I find a way of finding touch points with my audience that is not entirely scientific or it’s not entirely, how do I say that? Yeah. But anyway, something light that makes people is continuous on the first change. They’re not thinking about their professionalism in the moment, but they are thinking about being human together in the room.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And what are some African proverbs that come to mind? Because I’m sure listeners aren’t familiar with many of them. So is there one that you can share with us, the kinds of things that you’re using?

Eddie Jjemba:

Yeah, there’s one which says, if you want to carry a baby, don’t wait for them to get dirty or to get muddy. And in a way that one directly relates to my work, because for the changing climate, we need to take action before things get worse. So when I offer that, then I invite my audience to offer me some proverbs from their own context. I mean, although we are all Africa, but the countries can be completely different. Even within the country, there can be a lot of difference because we are different tribes, different culture setting and background. So I invite them to offer me more, and as they do that, they feel like this is a different kind of workshop altogether.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow, that makes me really curious when you say that if you want to carry a baby, don’t wait for it to get muddy. In what ways do you think you may have waited for things to get muddy in your facilitation practice before you carried them?

Eddie Jjemba:

Okay, I love that question. First and foremost, I never ever thought that facilitation can be work. I never had that facilitation. There was a profession called facilitation until I met people from the Red Cross who had invited me for a workshop, which was about climate change and games or games for climate. And they told me that I was good at facilitation, and I asked, “What’s that?” By that time, I had already been working as an environmental educator for about three years, I think. So the term facilitation was not there. That means that for those three years I did things ad hoc without any orientation about the basics of facilitation, the techniques of facilitation, in which way I think that that’s clearly I waited. I waited to carry the baby, but I didn’t know the baby existed. So in a way, while I waited to carry the baby, I wasn’t aware of the waiting itself. And later on, actually, I started, then I joined Red Cross.

One of the reasons, they really liked my facilitation skills, and they exposed me to various facilitation styles and techniques, and I was like, “Wow, I never knew that work could be fun like this.” Anyway, and then exposed me also to applied improvisation, liberating structures, all these amazing resources. And over time I have also learned that facilitation is kind of a craft. You get this piece and this and put them together and you get a blend. So if I get applied improv and then I add some liberating structure, I create this amazing thing. In my culture, in the African context, there’s a meal we call Katogo. Basically, it’s a mixture of things. You throw tomatoes there, you can throw other vegetables, leafy vegetables, you can throw various sources of protein and carbs, and you cook all together. So that’s my new perception of facilitation. Add several things together, come up with a flavor that is so blended, but very rich in test. Yes. Anyway, yeah. Right now I’m here. I’m immersed in facilitation, I love facilitation.

I notice though that it’s still growing in the African context. I’m privileged to be part of the community of facilitators from IAF, the International Association of Facilitation. But we are few, even within the African group, we are few. Anyway, which means there’s a lot of room for growth, given that lots of things are emerging within the African context to provide solutions to the changing climate, to the challenges in health, to the tech that is blooming, everything. So I tend to feel like there is a need to groom facilitators, to equip facilitators in the developing world, and that’s my new passion on my new discovered calling.

Douglas Ferguson:

Tell me a little bit more about that need. Why do you think that’s so important?

Eddie Jjemba:

Well, it is pretty important because, I mean, from my story, facilitation generally was never regarded as some sort of work. So if it’s not regarded as work, that means it’s not going to be prioritized in an organization. So if someone emerges and they come and they say, “Yeah, here I am, I need a job. I am a facilitator, a conversation facilitator.” They’d be like, “What are you talking about? We are here to do work, not to talk.” Then in my context, when we think about changing climate, while the worst is yet to be seen all around the world, Africa is in a very difficult place or it’ll be in a very difficult place.

We are at a time when we need to define policies that will help the most vulnerable people to be protected from adverse impacts of climate change. And to do that, we need to facilitate conversation between those who are most vulnerable, the scientists that are informing us, the local leaders, especially the cultural leaders who are highly treasured, and then the governments who are decision makers, the women and children, everyone has to be in the table, on the table to make this conversation rich. And so that the outcome is really informed by local experience. We need facilitators to create that room. There are very few, and the scientists who are quite enthusiastic as well as the decision makers, what they know right now is PowerPoint, one PowerPoint after another, which is quite boring, but they don’t know what to do. How different, what other ways can we do it? Can we pass on this information? Any sector that you talk about within Africa, they will need that. They’ll need facilitators because of the growth trajectory that we are looking at and the change that we need to bring about.

Douglas Ferguson:

What do you think the most promising source of facilitators are in that space?

Eddie Jjemba:

Source of facilitators? I don’t know where we can, because I don’t know where they are. But I think starting with executives, we have leaders all around, leaders in different sectors, leaders of campaigns, leaders of nonprofits, leaders. And I think because our setting is so much driven by top down, until we touch the leaders to appreciate the value of facilitation, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to commit some of their human resources and financial resources to empower their teams to be facilitators within the entities. But even between bridging the gap between their entities and other entities. Here we keep talking. For us, the humanitarian workers, we keep talking, we need partnerships, we need collaborations, but these need to be facilitated. In order to bridge these gaps, we need facilitators on the table equipped with facilitation skills. Now, one day when I wanted to just sharpen my facilitation skills, trying to get a little bit more. I looked at courses. I feel like the courses offered were quite out of reach in terms of finances, they’re costly basically, and if they’re costly, that becomes a prohibitive factor. So level one, we have the executive buy-in. Level two, it’s going to be the financial access or block.

So we’ll have to overcome the financial challenge for more Africans to access like cutting edge facilitation techniques. Now, where I work from, we try to infuse and empower our own humanitarian workers with facilitation techniques. So we organize either online trainings or in-person trainings to offer that what we have learned over time, and of course we have to continue guiding the champions and coaching them, mentoring them as they hone their facilitation skills. I think that those are the small baby steps we are taking for us within the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Climate Center, but also for the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Movement in general.

Douglas Ferguson:

Your mention of the Red Cross reminds me of the story you were telling earlier about the climate games and how foreign and strange that was for some of your coworkers. I’m really curious, how did those games work? What was it like being there and attending these programs?

Eddie Jjemba:

So for that particular game that oriented me into the world of facilitation, it was about forward-looking decision-making, and it’s basically like a tabletop simulation game with cards and with beans and dice representing probabilities and the beans representing finances. So you have to make an individual decision, but with consultation from others. So it was a game about forward-looking decision-making into 10-year future, and you’d experience the results of your decisions over the course of the game. However, there are other several ones which are basically small games to infuse some energy within a workshop, within a conference, within a meeting. Those ones, we pick them from here and they are from all over and try them out, put them into context and some fly and others flop, which reminds me earlier in my career, having been exposed to these various games at the climate center, I got an assignment to go to Somaliland and to play a game.

So I had a deck of cards, these usual cards, playing cards, but I was going to use them to just simulate people’s imagination who are not playing cards actually. But the moment I pulled out a deck of cards and I mentioned this is a deck of cards, my co-facilitator stopped me and said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Eddie, here in this context we never do gambling.” So anything related to gambling, I immediately noticed that look, while I was not there to gamble, but the cards are related, they are affiliated to gambling, this game cannot continue. So anyway, we try to get games and then we put them into our own context, but always trying to make sure that they remain relevant to the goal that we have of reducing, like understanding changing risks and then making decision in the moment which impact the future.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s always critical. No matter what we’re bringing into a session, just thinking about how can we make it applicable, how can we align it to our context, to our purpose? And when you tell me about the playing cards and gambling and the connotations there, it also reminds me of how just the importance of clarity and facilitation and how often cultural boundaries. I imagine from your perspective working in a continent that has many countries that are quite diverse, there seems to be a sense of unity around Africa in general, but also there’s so much diversity with all these countries and the cultural backgrounds, and so I can imagine it can be, to your point, these card decks are problematic because of gambling, but I bet there’s so many examples of just how the words we use and the metaphors and the symbols we use, we have to be careful about how people respond to those.

Eddie Jjemba:

Absolutely, absolutely. So they are 52 countries, and then even within the country itself, like one country where I am here in Uganda, they’re over 30 dialects, and some of which I cannot completely understand. So if I cannot even understand the language or the dialect, that means, is it called a steep slope? But it takes a lot of effort for me to understand the culture. That’s where storytelling and connecting with people comes in. And our culture is so much oriented. By starting a small conversation with a person with whom you are convening the meeting or the workshop or the conference, they can reveal to you or they often reveal to me lots of things through a story, short stories, long stories, stories in the corridor, stories across the table, stories when we are having lunch and tea. Through these stories, I practice active listening. I have to really listen carefully to pick out what are these cultural markstones that are coming up that are popping up as this person speaks. And later on I use them to design or to facilitate the agenda itself that I have at hand. Listening.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was going to ask you about that actually, because you were talking about being intentional about these touch points that you create so you can connect with them in a meaningful and personal way. And I was curious about your process for that. And so you touched on it just now a bit, but I’m really curious to know a little bit more on how that evolves. Is that stuff you’re doing? You mentioned that it influences how you think about the agenda, so it must be happening before the event. So how far ahead of time and are you just meeting with them in person, or are you doing this virtually? What’s your process like really getting to that clarity that you need to make those epiphanies to draw them in more?

Eddie Jjemba:

So often it involves both online and offline meetings. So the online to get check-in what is it that you really want to achieve with this meeting. And then after that, we follow up with another online probably, and then we get offline where possible in the preparations. That is if I’m within the country where the workshop is going to happen, sometimes I’m not, but even when I am not, I make sure that I add in a day before to review the agenda that we already discussed online. And during the process of reviewing it in person, often things emerge. Also, when I’m beginning to craft an agenda, I often talk to whoever has invited me or whoever I’m co-organizing with. Now this is a guide, but because it’s a guide, some details can change. Changing in the moment during the facilitation or just before or immediately during the time when we are reviewing a session. But look, talking about this process of trying to find out information before when we are designing the agenda.

I had never thought about it so much critically until I undertook the course from the Voltage Control. And when we’re doing, we had several books that we used, and one of my life-changing books as a facilitator was the gift from the Voltage Control, The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, who underscores the reason to find out the reason for the meeting by asking so many whys. Why, why, why, until you get to the real desire. In my case, often that is it’s usually bringing together scientists. I’m bringing together these decision makers from government, and then the scientists, while they say, “We are here to design something.” At the bottom is of their hearts is, “I am here to offer you the information that you need and therefore I need a lot of time so that I can go through all my slide decks.” But because of this learning to ask the why of the meeting, I have been able to also help the scientists know that yes, you need to deliver this information, but you also need people to listen to you.

Now my colleague says, “Do you want people to listen to you 10% and then they lose 90% of your content? Or do you want them to retain 90% of your content and therefore they should not be talked to more than 10% of the time.” Okay. So anyway, the point is I finally found comfort in asking a lot of, why would you like this workshop? Why would you like this meeting? Again and again, especially trying to get to the point of do you like it more interactive or less interactive, and what is the value of having it less interactive versus more interactive?

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s always interesting what you learn when you start to dial in and even to your point around making the agenda ahead of time based on some conversations, but then that day before really walking it through with them. And it’s a great opportunity to build some familiarity with folks and the flow that you plan and make changes in the last minute. And I think that demonstrates adaptability and builds a lot of trust and confidence.

Eddie Jjemba:

Yes, absolutely. And I’ve learned to ask, what would you like your participants to see, to feel, to think, to experience? And by asking those questions, it has helped people, my co-facilitators or the co-organizers to try to think holistically about the experience of a participant and to craft an agenda that suits the participants and make them feel enthusiastic about the work that we are going to do or about the work that we are already doing.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that, it shows up in the workshop design canvas that we created and how we think about how participants are going to leave and how they’re showing up, because then that gap can be really visible to us as designers, and so we know exactly what we need to address.

Eddie Jjemba:

And talking about designing, I discovered that I used to think that the designing part of the workshop is daunting. It’s a lonely activity. It’s a soul-searching activity, so to say. And I would try to quicken it, do it, chap, chap, so that we get to the day of facilitation and delivering. But I have learned that it’s worth the effort to spend a lot of time in designing phase of the workshop because it’ll determine a lot how the actual delivering of the workshop conference or meeting will happen. And if you do it in a co-development process, it yields even much more better fruits and the results are well co-owned. If something didn’t go well, all of you as the facilitation team would be like, “yes, we would’ve improved. And it reduces opportunities of pointing fingers that probably it was you Eddie who didn’t give sufficient time for design.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. It’s easier for people to assume positive intent and think about how we can improve versus trying to cast blame. For sure. Well, let’s see. In our remaining time, I want to kind of shift maybe just reflecting a bit, and my first semi-reflective question here is about the leaders that you mentioned, and how important it was to start with the leaders and to build appreciation for facilitation awareness, and maybe even get them trained to be better facilitators so that they can influence the organizations that they’re a part of. And I’m curious, what do you think are the hallmarks of leaders that are going to be the most receptive to facilitation or ones that might be more apt to embrace it, learn it, and adopt it.

Eddie Jjemba:

In terms of embracing and learning, I think of the mid-level managers, I think about them as the movers, the senior managers, I think about them as those who just offer a blessing. They need to experience it once and be like, yeah, go. No go. Once they have given a go, then the mid-level managers, these make it happen. And I love in our facilitation trainings for leaders, usually we want the senior management to identify a person and they hand them over to us, and usually that is a person who is in the mid-level management that we offer the different facilitation techniques, expose them to various methods and then guide them going forward. Now, once we have guided the mid-level managers, then they are enthusiastic also to guide even the lower management levels. So I feel like the movers are the mid-level managers, but of course they have to first get the goal from the senior level management.

Douglas Ferguson:

And what do you think are the qualities of the senior leaders that are the most apt to give the go ahead and who are the people that are pretty much ready but maybe just aren’t aware just yet?

Eddie Jjemba:

That’s a difficult one to answer, but who are the most ready? I don’t know. It’s hard to find the most ready ones.

Douglas Ferguson:

And maybe not a specific person or a specific industry, but what are the qualities? What do you think is true about those people?

Eddie Jjemba:

Okay. There have to be some people who are enthusiastic about their work and about sustainable change. Now, the word sustainability, I think sometimes it’s misused, but a leader who would love to see change an impact for the kind of work that they do, they are likely to embrace because they’ll be able to see its capacity to drive change. And for the leaders who are not enthusiastic, it’s less likely, but also leaders who are probably young and energetic and young is relative, but those who are enthusiastic to learn new things, probably that’s the quality that I want to put forward. They’re the ones that are likely to appreciate facilitation and hopefully encourage their teams to have these facilitation skills. I also tend to think it’s not good to have this single person in an organization as our go-to facilitator, rather than everyone should have some level of facilitation because we are facilitating day in and day out. The scale differs, but we are.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it makes a big difference when even folks that aren’t positional leaders or aren’t hosting meetings, if they’re showing up with an understanding and appreciation of good facilitation skills, they’re going to be better meeting attendants. They’re going to help out and bring more people in. And the success of the gathering just skyrockets. I mean, imagine if every wedding you went to was attended by wedding planners, it’d probably be a pretty spectacular event, right? There’d be a lot of sympathy and empathy for what everyone’s going through, right?

Eddie Jjemba:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, this need for that diversity, diversifying facilitation, how do

Douglas Ferguson:

You think that facilitation will continue to shape the future of climate?

Eddie Jjemba:

Great, great, great great, great question. Look, I think actually it’s going to be very, very important. Number one, if you do a Google search immediately, you’ll find lots of meetings about climate, lots of workshops, and even mega conferences that happen like the one that we call the conference of parties, where big decisions happen, when these meetings are not well facilitated. There is passivity, passiveness in the attendance, passiveness in contributing great ideas, passiveness in owning the outcome. Now, I think we are going to need, and my hope is that we’ll have lots of skilled and even semi-skilled facilitators having these very interactive, highly engaging meetings starting from the lowest level of administration. In my case, it’ll be the village to the highest level of administration, which would be at the global level. Getting the voices of those who are most impacted heard, but also getting the voices of those who are best skilled at producing solutions equally hard in the same room to define the solution for climate.

And when it comes to cities, it is even going to be more important. The world is becoming urbanized day by day. We have already gone past the 50% of the world’s population living in cities, and it’s expected it’s going to rise into eighties. Some other places like the Latin America and the Caribbean have already also got there. But anyway, wherever we have a lot of diversity concentrated in the single place, and we need to make a decision or to come up with solutions that are co-owned, which is the case for the climate change, we need facilitation We need excellent facilitation. That is the force that will ensure adequate inclusion of older voices and which means acceptable solutions for those who are there. Yeah, I think that we will come to a place where we have even climate change specialists having facilitation as one of their job descriptions, I think. Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

As we come to an end here, I’d love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Eddie Jjemba:

One, facilitation is not designed. It’s a skill which can be learned. So it’s not only for extroverts, it’s not only for introverts. Anyone can be a facilitator, but it is an art, which means we have to be intentional as facilitators getting various facilitation techniques, crafting them together to come up with unique facilitation styles, which are also applicable for specific cultural contexts. The other one is we need to spread facilitation as a profession, especially within developing countries, both in Africa, in Asia and elsewhere. I feel like there’s a big gap in terms of facilitation skills in the developing world, and one, there has to be awareness and appreciation that it’s needed both by leaders, but everyone as well. And then two, to make it accessible, especially to remove the financial barriers that makes people not able to access facilitation skills offered in conferences, in trainings, elsewhere. And I think lastly, it’s so rewarding to facilitate a productive conversation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Eddie, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Eddie Jjemba:

Thank you very much, Douglas. Thanks for hosting me. And yes, I look forward to seeing the panel of Facilitation moving all around.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration. Voltagecontrol.com.