Sounds boring doesn’t it, but it is rather interesting even if you don’t have to run as many meetings as I do.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a four day facilitation training put on by Leadership Strategies. The course I took is titled “The Effective Facilitator” and was taught by Brian Cole Miller. (I think he would appreciate me linking to his Amazon author page as opposed to his company’s website, so that is what I have done) Leadership Strategies does not have many, if any, trainers on staff but instead use contractors.

I found Brian to be a very effective facilitator and a pleasure to meet and work with.

As I told my co-workers upon returning was that I found the training to be surprisingly good and helpful. So often, trainings can be boring and uninformative. I was excited for this training going in but didn’t expect so much of it to apply to me.

At my company, Affinnova, which I love and if you want to come work here let me know, we hold Lunch and Learns to talk mostly about other software development related issues and topics. This time around it is my turn and since I recently attended the aforementioned training, I opted to boil down my 4 days of learnings into an hour long presentation.

In my experience of working in web application development I have tried and used many-a-web-service some of which are cool and some of which are so-so and some of which are very unique and do what they do well enough to continue using. Prezi.com is one of those. I have used Prezi.com only six times so far over the last two-plus years and they continue to improve. While their product isn’t applicable in all cases, where it is applicable it really makes for a more entertaining presentation as compared to their slide based competitors (SlideRocket.com, Acrobat.com [formerly Buzzword], Google Docs, 280slides.com, …).

See for yourself in the following Prezi I put together for my lunch and learn. Let me know what you think.