Facilitation Services

A meeting is an event where people take minutes and waste hours, they say. Sounds familiar?

You probably don’t need a professional facilitator for that weekly team meeting, or your normal updates and pow-wows. If you have to get together for something especially important, high-stakes, sensitive, or complex, you might get a lot of value out of working with a professional facilitator. Likewise, if you need to have a neutral party to elicit different perspectives while keeping it safe for all, or process expertise to bring about an effective meeting, it is probably time to find a facilitator. 

There are several types of meetings that can benefit from the use of a facilitator:

• Corporate summits/offsites
• Key strategy meetings
• Crafting of organizational mission, vision, values
• Staff meetings and retreats
• In-house conferences (think un-conference!)
• Innovation or design thinking workshops
• Design sprints
• Process innovation

There are some instances where a professional facilitator is NOT necessary:

• The decision had already been made
• Decision makers and stakeholders are not open to alternatives other than their own
• The meeting is informative in nature and requires no engagement nor creation by the group (in which case I recommend to have a townhall instead)
• There is already commonality of opinion on how to proceed for that particular stage of decision or rollout

Benefits of having a professional, neutral facilitator:

• We are subject matter experts in guiding groups through tough, complex conversations and discussions
• Because of our subject matter expertise in facilitation, we have a range of methods and activities to get you to the outcomes you want
• We create engagement and involve everyone in the group in the discussions and keep everyone present
• We take the logistical work and agenda off the client, so that the critical stakeholders can focus on the work at hand and outcome
• We support synthesizing and guiding groups through critical and/or fuzzy decision points

Stages of a facilitation project

The job of a facilitator begins way before the actual retreat or meeting. There are, broadly speaking, 3 stages a facilitator will go through with you in this journey of partnership:

• Pre-retreat: Stakeholder engagement, Planning
• Believe it or not, the facilitation actually begins the moment you speak with him/her.

There are a few things the facilitator will do here:

1. Outcome setting:

The facilitator will meet with you and the relevant stakeholders to set the outcomes of the retreat/meeting. Partnership and clarity on outcomes of the retreat is established

2. Agenda creation:

Based on the outcomes, the facilitator will work with you and design the flow of processes and activities that will get the participants to the outcomes

3. Preparation:

The facilitator may sometimes request for engagement with the participants prior to the program to prepare them for the retreat, or to get a sensing of the ecosystem. Because sometimes, what the stakeholders want may be different from what the ecosystem needs. The facilitator may then make recommendations for consideration

During: The Retreat/Meeting

On the actual day (or days), the facilitator will:

1. Provide Leadership: The facilitator will take over leadership of the meeting and set the context of the meeting. Relationship, partnership and roles are established right from the beginning. The facilitator is the process expert, the participants are the content experts.
2. Create engagement and participation: The facilitator will create the environment necessary for authentic and rich conversations to happen, making sure everyone is present mentally to address the issue in a meaningful way.
3. Synthesize and making consensus: The facilitator will support in distilling the conversations in a way everyone understands. Consensus and/or agreement will be created on the decisions made in the room that will contribute to the outcome.

Post-retreat: Reporting
Your facilitator’s job does not end at the end of the retreat/meeting.

They will summarize the proceedings and document the decision points during the meeting into a reference document, so that the participants post-meeting can use it for sharing and reflection purposes. In some cases, the foundation document for what is to happen next in the organization.

We can help your trainers, learning facilitators, and instructional designers excel in creating more meaningful learning experiences.

We offer a variety of coaching services for learning and development practitioners looking to improve their skills in the following areas:

• Learning Facilitation and Training/Development
• Virtual and blended learning instructional design
• F2F instructional design

Coaching and consultancy services can include:

• Goal setting and needs assessment
• Program design review
• In-session observation
• Post-session coaching
• Area-specific walk throughs, guidance, and content review
• Trainer effectiveness coaching