What strategies will we learn about in support of these goals?

Having confident conversations on the business which bring insight
  • Positioning your role with the client/team
  • Exploring vision and potential – their dreams and aspirations (magic wand)
  • Exploring where people are against that – the gaps, differences, concerns
  • Past projects – their personal perspective on the factors in their progress
  • How they want to use this opportunity to see their people (& colleagues) grow
Facilitating a rich and engaging experience for all participants
  • Raising their expectations and openness through 1:1 interviews
  • Techniques for multi-channel participation (as demonstrated)
  • Questions to syndicates and walkround feed-back
  • Practicing facilitation of group exercises, and gaining feedback
Using the power of questions to stimulate productive debate & participation
  • Using positioning and perspective segregation to drive discussions
  • Establishing syndicates and work areas/groups to increase engagement
  • Allowing it to go wrong, highlighting its consequences, and offering process
  • Building a picture in your mind so you have the next question ready
  • Helpful questions (for each of the different stages/styles of learning)
  • Throwing questions to the front back out into the room
Understanding how we read the room, and how the room reads us
  • Becoming more aware of body language and how we can listen to it
  • Recognising and modifying our own body-language to influence attitudes
  • Understanding group behaviours and what to look out for
  • Seating positions and how to adjust them for more balanced outcomes
  • The use of ongoing feedback to understand overall shifts in attitude
  • The use of meeting review to understand customer impact
Flexing, diverting and changing the process to get to the end point
  • Clarity on what we are trying to achieve (at the meta-level)
  • Understand what facilitation actually is in regard to the group
  • Knowing the range of tools and techniques that are available
  • Ways to explore where you are in respect of the goal (remaining gap)
  • Pulling the group up to the meta level so they can be part of the design
Bringing people round, and building ownership for the outcomes
  • Being a trusted repository for their hopes, concerns and agendas (interview)
  • Maximising the opportunity for people to contribute and repeat that (walkround)
  • Understanding the reasons for conflict, and finding solutions to reconcile it
  • Engaging the Chief customer as the custodian of some of this role (arbiter)
Ensuring the outcome before the first person arrives at the workshop
  • Interviews to understand attitudes and pre-empt agendas
  • Role of process and groundrules to enable you to overview (what is meta)
  • Delivering pre-work and developing a step-wise process
  • Ensuring a realistic objective for the event, and partnership  in delivering it

 

And what specific tools and techniques are we seeking to demonstrate and experience within that?

  1. Using interview feedback
  2. Hopes & Concerns / Strengths & Weaknesses exercise
  3. Managing expectations ‘is … / is not …’
  4. Facilitated syndicate groups
  5. Use of groundrules
  6. Use of Car Park
  7. Personal checklists
  8. Facilitation rota (maintaining responsibility with the client)
  9. Facilitation (Task) briefing sheet
  10. Using on-line feedback
  11. Affinity diagrams
  12. Walkround process
  13. Using a timer slide
  14. Sticky dots for prioritisation
  15. Exercises to raise energy and make a point
  16. Capturing feedback into a model to illustrate a point
  17. Team self-reflection
  18. Drawing feedback to the front
  19. Magic wand – fictional constructs & perspective shift
  20. Free wander feedback
  21. Reverse fishbone diagram
  22. Selective feedback of syndicate output
  23. Using examples
  24. Syndicates to take different perspectives
  25. Developing good questions
  26. Walk and talk
  27. Clothesline
  28. Consensus reaching
  29. Simulation exercises
  30. Self-selecting syndicates
  31. Individual listing as a primer
  32. Use of partitioned pre-work
  33. Presentation techniques
  34. Barriers and solutions syndicate