Facilitate Workshop — A 2-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Course Synopsis

• Are you working as an internal or external consultant or business analyst?
• Do you run information gathering events and wish you could be more effective?
• Are you involved in change and wonder how to build commitment and consensus to ideas?
• Do you find yourself helping people make decisions and solve problems so that they stay solved?
• Do you wish you could structure your meetings more effectively?
• Have you ever been concerned about managing difficult behaviours in meetings?
• Do you wish you could generate more creativity and fun into your meetings?
• Have you ever considered being a facilitator or building your facilitation skills?

If the answer is "YES" - this is the course for you!

Run as a workshop, this highly interactive and fun course will help you to build confidence and skill as a facilitator. Guided by an experienced facilitator, you will explore tools, techniques and tactics for making your workshops and meetings memorable and effective. You will participate in activities which will help you to encourage groups to think differently, to share information and gain consensus in decision making.

You will learn proven tactics for managing challenging group behaviours and ensuring that you get the best from all workshop participants. By using a structured framework, you will be better able to organise the workshop to achieve its objectives and outcomes.

Course Objectives

During this training course, delegates will:

• Share your experience of running or attending facilitated events
• Consider ways of engaging a group and getting them to focus on the task at hand
• Understand the need to structure a workshop so that all aspects of team development are covered and you are able to deliver against the required workshop objectives and outcomes
• Draw on a myriad of techniques for encouraging groups to share information, understand organisational issues, identify problem solutions, make desisions, build action plans
• Have a chance to share your concerns about being a facilitator and gain some ideas for overcoming these
• Learn how professional facilitators manage an assignment to circumvent problems at the event
• Have the opportunity to build a personal action plan to support application of the problem solving techniques when you are back in the workplace

From the Practical Workshops, students will gain:

• The chance to facilitate a group of people using one of the many techniques to support business effectiveness and receive constructive feedback to support personal development
• The chance to participate in a range of facilitated events and to offer feedback on the facilitator's performance and the effectiveness of the technique
• The opportunity to learn from others
• Time to reflect on your current practice and build confidence for future success

Intended Audience

This course is intended for:

• Anyone who works as an internal or external consultant or business analyst
• Those who would like to be more effective at gathering information and reaching agreement with a group
• Anyone working in the change arena
• People with some problem solving experience who would like to hone their facilitation skills

Benefits for your Company

All organisations face change and need to solve problems so that they stay solved. Having people who are adept and confident to run facilitated events encourages teams to contribute to any change situation and enhances buy-in and commitment to the change. In addition, facilitation techniques help change teams gather information and share ideas quickly and cost-effectively.

Benefits for You

You will learn new skills and techniques for getting people to work together more effectively. You will have the opportunity of practising as a facilitator and participating in a series of facilitated sessions, gaining personal and group feedback. Even if you have some facilitation experience, you will be able to compare your personal practice and learn new ways of engaging workshop participants.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Outline Course Contents

Introduction & Welcome

You will be introduced to the other participants, and to the format of the course. The interactive style of the event will be introduced with initial exercises to consider the term 'facilitation', what it means and how facilitation can be used. There will be an opportunity for you to share your personal objectives for the event.

The Role of Ice-Breakers

A chance for you to facilitate a session or act as a participant to identify why an ice-breaker might be used and to share ice-breakers the other course members have known and loved. You will use brainstorming and flipchart techniques.

Group Dynamics

You will learn how the Tuckman model of team dynamics can be applied to facilitated events. Motivation factors will be considered to help you to encourage teams to achieve a workshop goal.

The Attributes of a Great Facilitator

Another chance for you to facilitate a session or act as a participant to identify and gain consensus to the key strengths of great facilitators. You will use nominal group technique with post-its and voting. The output from this event will be used as a benchmark for you to assess your own level competence as a facilitator.

Facilitation Framework

You will be introduced to a framework used by professional facilitators and encouraged to consider how you could apply this back in the work place.

Identifying Business Problems

Another facilitation opportunity, to identify the business problems faced by your fellow course members and to prioritise those which give them most concern. You will use nominal group technique again, this time with the full group, brown paper and post-its. A simple voting technique will help you and the group reach a consensus about the most urgent and important issues.

Problem Solving / Team Building (PS/TB)

This session will introduce you to a pre-planned short facilitated workshop which encourages team work and embraces the key tenets of problem solving and decision making best practice.

You will be guided through the essential activity of defining a problem statement which will be based on those problems you and your fellow course members identified as priorities during the previous session.

You will then have the opportunity of facilitating or acting as a participant of a small group progressing through the various stages of the PS/TB workshop to drive out and evaluate possible solutions to a specific business problem.

Process Mapping

Process mapping technique will be described and you will the various share ways of using it to support business communications and planning. There will be another facilitation opportunity to build a swim-lane process map using brown paper and post-its.

Creativity

You will be guided through group exercises and workshops to consider some important aspects of a creative workshop approach. We will explore De Bono's Six Thinking Hats, Reversal Technique and Associated Brainstorming to generate different and 'off the wall' solutions.

There will be opportunity for you and your fellow course members to facilitate these sessions using other business problems identified on Day 1.

Handling Difficult Behaviours

During this session you will have the opportunity to share concerns about managing challenging behaviours in workshops. We will draw on best practice of ensuring that workshop participants define the group rules and have received sufficient information prior to the event.

Giving you a final facilitation opportunity, we will use the collective experience of the group to offer some suggestions for managing this type of workshop problem.

Personal Action Planning

This session will give you the opportunity to review your original objectives, share learning from the two day course and build a personal action plan as a facilitator.