Facilitation
Simply put, facilitation is about helping a group, a team or an organization accomplish its goals. Our unique facilitation process is designed to build consensus, maximize participation and move a team or organization toward action.
Your senior leadership team, commission, board or work group faces complex decisions involving multiple issues and diverse perspectives. You know the group will be more successful if someone could help them work together more productively.
You need a top-notch facilitator.
We help with the planning, the organizing, the smooth facilitation of the meeting(s) itself, and with the follow-up.
Planning & Preparation.
In our planning we interview key team members and look for themes, areas of agreement and contention, decision & communication styles, and possible hidden agendas. This helps you gain a sense of what to expect, as well as giving you an opportunity to let the participants know what to expect. It also helps us establish the objectives for the meeting and plan an agenda which will safely get to the issues and maximize the time the team spends together in discussion, problem-solving and decision-making. During the design phase, we also ensure optimal room setup and logistics.
Meeting Facilitation.
We work with you to design exercises to ensure creative flow and we provide insights into decision-making and problem-solving techniques and approaches, and ensure we hear the ideas and input from the group. People own the solutions they help create, so our primary purpose is to create buy-in, not only to the definition and understanding of a problem, but also to its resolution.
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says, “Of the best leader, when the job is done the people say ‘we did it ourselves.'”
You can be sure:
- everyone is working on the same problem, and working the challenges one at a time
- everyone participates and “buys-in” to the solutions
- participants adhere to certain ground rules for team behavior and how the group will work together
- a running memory of group decisions, solutions, responsibilities and timelines will be created
Follow-up.
Your choice – either we can capture and write-up all the information discussed, decisions made and who will do what by when, or we will help a scribe collect and interpret the information captured on flip-charts during the session. Our clients tell us, however, that our follow-up reports become the blueprint for continued action for many weeks and months to come.
