Why IAF conferences are in my blood - IAFIndia2025

From the Woven Garden Session conducted by Kala Diwanji, Varsha Chitnis and myself

 It's the experience.

This "experience" is made up of:

• Fun
• Learning
• Building new Relationships
• Nurturing old relationships

I've been attending them since 2015, barring a couple of years where other things in life asserted (and inserted) themselves to take precedence over the conference.  I've also volunteered for some of the conferences, on specific teams like the Proposal Team or the Registration Team.  I have also had the good fortune to be able to present a Facilitation Process (jointly) at two IAF India conferences (2019 & 2025) and the IAF Asia Conference in 2023.  All these have added to my experience in such a manner that I always feel "Yeh Dil Mange More".  So I had taken up the role of Co-lead for Mumbai hub from 2018 to 2020.

Here are memories of past conferences with some of my co-facilitators with whom I had a blast both designing the session and running it.

With Kala Diwanji and Varsha Chitnis at IAF India Conference Pune 2025

With Hideyuki Yoshioka and Varsha Chitnis at IAF Asia Conference in Hyderabad 2023

By the way, we were facilitating Large Groups (Hyderabad had approx. 200 and Pune had about 80 participants) for both the above sessions.

As a volunteer for IAF, you can add the term "community bonding" to the list mentioned above.  For me this is critical because volunteering creates the "belonging"  feeling that leads to us all bonding as a community.

In the #IAF2025 conference too, the challenge is which sessions to attend.  Unlike other non-IAF conferences where we wait for gyan from speakers, here at IAF conferences, we create the gyan ourselves thanks to the superb facilitation processes run by the Facilitators whose sessions are diligently managed by the Proposal Team, and evaluated by CPFs.

We rekindle old friendships and make some new ones.

We add to our basket of facilitation tools, not just during the conference, but even later where we can call those facilitators to clarify and gain more insights into their processes.

I enjoyed all the sessions I attended at IAFIndia2025, but the ones that stood out for me are:

Ravi Bhaviskar - Re-live Impact Story of Empowering Barefoot and Brilliant Girls

Ravi Bhaviskar's Facilitation Impact story showcasing how he used facilitation to enable the #barefoot and brilliant girls to dream big.   He even ran the process he used with the girls for us to get the experience of what he had done for them.

Zoom to read those stickers

Anand Mehta's wonderfully immersive process on Gratitude and Healing.

Ajit Kamath in Action

Ajit Kamath's masterclass on the IAF Competencies - done through facilitation processes.

Group pic of our Large Group session on 14 Nov 2025

Grateful thanks to IAFIndia, the core team, volunteers, session buddies and student volunteers, not forgetting our sponsors for making sure that we have a fabulous experience.  I'm eagerly looking forward to the next conference.

Action from workshop on Effective Performance Feedback

Source: Pinterest

The image is, for me, clearly descriptive of what Effective Feedback is about.

We know that "Feedback is considered the breakfast of champions".  We also know that it is essential to our growth, sometimes our survival too.

Fortunately or unfortunately, most people think that feedback is for someone else (not for them) to accept and action.  Giving feedback effectively is also difficult since most leaders and managers also are not formally trained to do this.  They tell their people told to "do better", "take to the next level", "kuch accha karo" and not surprisingly, the performance barely improves, leaving everyone frustrated.

When I put this workshop design together, I made sure that I included certain key topics like Bias Awareness, in addition to Feedback Models and role plays to allow participants to put learning into practice.  

This is part of the Leadership Journey Program for an organization that I have been involved in since September 2025.  

Expectations

What makes Feedback Effective and Ineffective

Putting Individual Learning into action

These are from the Hybrid session on the same topic.

Do get in touch with me on +919820155778 or ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com if you would like to improve your team's performance by equipping the leaders and managers in Making Feedback Effective.

And yes, the cover image of this post was used in the workshop.