Group Facilitation

Facilitation is the art of leading people through processes towards decisions and outcomes in a focused way that actively and positively encourages participation, ownership and creativity.

External facilitators are independent of the group so can keep the discussion on track without becoming personally involved, encouraging everyone to participate and helping the group to make decisions and reach a conclusion. 

Facilitation is a highly versatile tool that can be used in any number of situations.  For example, we have facilitated groups in order to:

• Bring new management teams together to explore their vision and formulate strategy;
• Help teams to come up with new ideas and processes that improve efficiency;
• Rejuvenate efforts on outstanding issues where progress to date has been slow;
• Hold a management offsite that brings a fully debated and universally agreed set of actions back to the business;
• Explore what diversity really means to the team or organisation and how it can be used as a positive force for generating new ideas, relationships, cultures and strategies;
• Explore solutions to specific problems such as staff turnover, cost issues, competitor activity, recruitment difficulties;
• Create a team ethos and effective working practices for geographically dispersed colleagues;
• Explore and resolve conflicts effectively.

We start by understanding and agreeing the objectives with the key stakeholders, and then devise a process to get results.   Each process is designed to suit the specific group, the culture, the task to complete and the business context.  Our experience of techniques and theories such as Appreciative Inquiry, Group Relations and Action Learning is applied but we don’t introduce theoretical terms to groups unless they are relevant – we just use the right models to get the job done! And if you want to really make your meetings matter, we can help you to transform them using the Thinking Environment.

Just call or email us to explore how professional facilitation could be a useful tool to transform positively the outcomes of critical meetings in your organisation.  For an overview of the stages of facilitation, please click here.