Just attended a great Skype seminar with Johnnie Moore on Facilitation for Surprise.

Johnnie had some great insights. The most important—and the key to effective facilitation: be flexible, be equal.

Now, it seems to me, that if you are giving a presentation—as I often do—the only way you can be flexible is if you thoroughly know your topic—knowing the topic empowers you to adapt to technical glitches and to better engage the audience.

That’s not to say that you need to have all the answers. In fact, I think you establish stronger rapport and trust if you admit that you don’t know what you don’t know. What it does mean, though, is that you need to know the presentation good enough so that you can engage in a meaningful conversation, not a scripted “act”.

And when you’ve got the presentation down cold, you can comfortably engage the participants as an equal, not as “the expert”, which means that everyone will get a lot more value out of the meeting.

He covered a lot more in the seminar—I’m only scratching the surface. There’s a couple more of his seminars coming up, and I would strongly recommend you attend.