Facilitation

Better Results - More Quickly

Facilitation is different than leading a meeting or conducting training.  While drawing on the fundamentals of coaching, facilitation uses a specific set of skills and processes that help groups think, talk, and work together more effectively.  

Bringing Teams Together

When done well, facilitation ensures:

  • Every participant’s contributions are honored
  • Data, both structured and unstructured, are dealt with quickly and efficiently
  • Individual contributions are pooled together in informative and inclusive patterns
  • Diversity is welcomed, minimizing polarization and conflict

Facilitation can range from as short as 2 hours up to multi-day strategic planning. It can also be coupled with team development workshops, leveraging the True Tilt or Kolbe. All facilitation activities can be done online as well as in person.

"Bob masterfully facilitated our board's strategic planning session. We needed a strong facilitator, one that would help us come together to define our roles and responsibilities and create a succession plan."

Tools and Methods that I use in Facilitation:

Focused Conversations – Used throughout all facilitation and training activities. This involves a set of questions and activities that focus and set the boundaries for the conversation. This includes surfacing the Rational (the intent or practical goal) and the Experiential (the inner impact of the conversation – affecting the mood and tone of the group). Essentially the: What? – Gut – So What? – Now What?

Building Consensus – The focus is to avoid those meetings where it feels impossible to come to any sort of decision. A Consensus Workshop is a way to come to a shared agreement in a short period of time through a collective, integrated thinking process. Example applications for this work include: creating a shared vision, goals, or objectives, setting team priorities, agreeing on decision criteria, aligning, overcoming barriers, and motivating teams.

Action Planning – This process is used for short-term planning of an event or project that’s already been agreed upon or has some degree of consensus already. This type of facilitation helps with clarifying direction, aligning resources, designating leadership roles and responsibilities, building team trust, and support of one another.

Strategic Planning – Strategic Planning is a two day or longer commitment used to build a strategic plan. At the end of this facilitation, you will have a strategic plan that also includes concrete action steps for moving the plan forward (it will not become shelf-ware). This involves pre-work before the meeting to clarify who will participate, understand the environment, and determine the focus for the planning session. There are then 4 distinct steps undertaken by the group to create the strategic plan. These include: creating a practical vision, identifying and analyzing contradictions and obstacles that could impede the vision, determining strategies that deal with these obstacles to the vision, and finally, the creation of a focused Implementation Plan.