Facilitation

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Team leaders and managers succeed or fail on the basis of their ability to orchestrate the collective efforts of the diverse people they manage. You are perfectly aware that abundant, rampant diversity is the driver of the new (a quick look at the natural world tells you so, especially if you've been brought up on a diet of David Attenborough's natural history programmes). If you could only reconcile the teeming multiplicity of ideas, opinions, knowledge, skills, perspectives and intelligences in your team and in your organisation, you just know that brilliant and elegant business solutions are there for the taking.

People have different ideas on everything from strategy, through to whose turn it is to make the coffee. We live in disruptive, fast-moving times full of discontinuous change. To adapt, the cycle time for reconciling all this difference must be short. Trouble is, without the crucial facilitations skills for reaching consensus and without smart ways of analysing and addressing the challenges you face, your solutions either become irrelevant because they took so long to reach, or worse, those solutions are never found, with subsequent reputational damage to teams, managers and organisations.

If advocacy and enthusiastic ownership are required, rather than foot-dragging, we must find rapid approaches to reaching consensus that enable people to bring real attack to implementation. The dismal alternative, sometimes referred to as 'taking an (unilateral) executive decision', is usually a last resort, (and although it can work, to be acceptable it requires pretty delicate handling).

We have thought long and hard about how to help organisations cost effectively acquire depth and breadth in facilitation excellence. Our Facilitation Starter Pack builds the foundation skills for facilitating teams and workgroups of 2-25 people. Some of your facilitators will be able to develop super-facilitator skills. They will develop a deep understanding of the knowledge base and will be able to use advanced techniques for working with groups of 25-200 people. We sell our skill (our tacit knowledge) in the market place but we provide our explicit knowledge, royalty free, in soft copy format for you to use over and over without incurring repeat copy charges. Skills development isn't cost effective if it doesn't ‘take' and we take the implementation and sustainability issues very seriously. Let's outline these areas in a little more detail.

The Facilitation Starter Pack
Your facilitators will develop the design skills to create efficient, highly productive meetings of 2-25 people that result in timely actions, decisions and solutions.

They will develop their facilitation skills in specialist areas such as:

• Process improvement and redesign in order to secure improvements in cost, quality, service and cycle time.
• Conflict resolution for conflicted teams, and also for colleagues who are in morale draining 1:1 dispute with each other.
• Formal problem analysis and problem solving (and we've got another interesting take on these ideas for super-facilitators).
• Fast track team building, and developing team measurement systems.
• Using coaching and critical incident analysis we coach them in handling tricky team dynamics

Advanced Facilitation for Super-Facilitators
This is for people who have acquired the facilitation fundamentals. A deep knowledge of system dynamics and the new science of complexity provide the theoretical base for enabling your super-facilitators to work with the whole of your system or with powerful microcosms representing it. These are premium skills that our own consultants earn good money for providing (click here for more details). The cost savings of having your own in-house high-level facilitators won't be lost on you.

We will prepare and coach them in a range of large group interventions. Here are some examples of these (some you will have heard of, some you won't):

• Open space technology
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Real time strategic change
• Future search
• Search conference

And many others. These methods enable your organisation to align, and then move, at remarkable speed.

Soft copy materials, methods, pro-formas
Any development of facilitators that you commission from us is supported by soft copy of the various techniques and processes. You can place these on your intranet and they are never lost, easily retrievable and can be adapted and printed out on demand. Then, as your facilitators develop their craft and do their own study of the field, they can further add to the organisation's pool of knowledge of group processes for rapidly creating those actions, decisions and solutions.

Implementation and Sustainability
If we sell you something that isn't sustainable we enter into a form of deception. Here are some of the things on offer to ensure that good practice ‘takes' in the organisation:

• In a fair and just world, people would be exposed to a series of carefully graded experiences of increasing difficulty. However the world doesn't provide carefully graded experiences. We support facilitators by following them into those real meetings that they facilitate. We catch them if they stumble and we provide ways of handling any complex dynamics they happen upon that might otherwise overwhelm them and tempt them to set aside their hard won skills.
• We can train your own trainers so that they become the in-house thought leaders and content experts for the programme.
• We have devised apprenticeship models that exponentially accelerate the dissemination of the skills. This augments the training provided by your own trainers who will be overwhelmed if there are hundreds to train in a short time.
• We can help you devise ways of auditing the observance of good practice to agreed (i.e. locally owned) standards.

Two brief examples of programmes we've provided to organisations:

An electronics company asked us to provide development for a group of facilitators who would become involved in project reviews, implementing lean manufacturing and other process improvement efforts. This group received the facilitation starter pack and have reported great success, particularly in rolling out a company wide no blame culture. We are just beginning the move to advanced approaches.

A forensic mental health service commissioned us to provide facilitation skills for senior managers and team leaders. You can read a detailed case study on this work by clicking here.