Facilitation

Think of facilitation as being the oil that makes things work smoothly. A well-facilitated meeting or event, for example, will typically be an enjoyable experience that engages all participants and meets the desired outcomes in the time available. The role of the facilitator is to make it easy for the group or team to achieve what they need to achieve. Naturally this is not always easy, but that’s where we add value.

Anon: Given the people coming I thought it was going to be a car crash meeting, but it went incredibly well.

HR Director: We got the right facilitator... Source withheld at the request of the client, quoted with permission.

We have 20 years’ experience in facilitating groups from front-line staff to executive teams in a wide range of settings, from small group to large conferences. Our team includes Certified Professional Facilitators, certified by the International Association of Facilitators, who also have a strong background in brain friendly learning.

The most common comments we get from our participants include:

Enlightening, empowering, engaging, inspiring, fun, great use of time.

Need a facilitator?

To find out more about how we our facilitators can help, do get in touch.
Facilitation can help in so many different situations. Here are just a few ways we’ve used it with clients:

Changing Culture. When good facilitation is at the heart of the change process, engagement levels soar, problems senior leaders hadn’t anticipated get aired and dealt with, and people feel involved and included. Facilitation is beneficial in lots of contexts, but in our experience it adds the most value when it’s at the heart of cultural change.
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa Conference. Working with a group of 15 facilitators, we designed break out sessions for 500 conference participants in order to tackle the top challenges Africa was facing with agricultural development. Progress from the sessions resulted in funding of $80 million from interested parties.
Developing workplace inclusion while increasing diversity. As a part of our client’s wish to gain an award for Diversity and Inclusion, we worked with the executives, senior managers and middle managers to raise awareness of the company’s challenges, build commitment to future staff resourcing and recruitment strategies, and help with integration of a more diverse population into the company.
Developing vision and strategy with Clinical Commissioning Boards.
Improving the efficiency of enrolment and admissions processes for a College of Higher and Further Education.
Meetings. Sadly most people have experienced meetings that are either a waste of time or simply don’t achieve what’s needed in the time available, which is where good facilitation can help. There’s typically a strong link between meetings culture and organisational culture, so cracking how meetings are run can be an important lever in bringing about improvements to overall company culture too.
Conference Calls. Running an effective conference call is an art, and not one that is necessarily easy. Many remote teams succeed or fail based on the quality of their conference calls, and the people who are great at it gain significant competitive advantage.

Train your own facilitators

Many clients realise that building their own group of facilitators brings huge benefits, particularly when the organisation is facing periods of change.

We specialise in building internal facilitation capability, and offer a wide range of programmes, all of which can be aligned with the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) competencies for those who would like to get an internationally recognised qualification.

Contact us for more information on:

Getting started with facilitation
Facilitator masterclasses
The Lean-6 Sigma facilitator
Facilitating virtual meetings
Preparing for IAF assessment