Often we assume that all we need to do is to bring the right people together and great ideas will emerge. But for most of us, meetings and planning discussions are very far from this ideal! In our facilitation work, we provide structure, and an impartial perspective to ensure that your group discussion stays focused, benefits from the differing views in the room, and achieves its objectives.
Before your meeting, planning session or strategy day we will work with you to identify the objectives of the discussions and what outcomes must be achieved. Next we develop a structure for the event – a plan of what questions we will address, which discussion techniques we will employ and how we will record contributions. During the meeting itself our facilitator will take responsibility for the process, allowing all participants the space to contribute. As someone without a stake in the outcome, we will encourage all voices to be heard and help participants to understand each other’s positions. Our facilitator will also share techniques for generating ideas and for coming to consensus. Finally we will provide a typed record of all the notes, flipcharts and post-its generated by the discussions.
For three consecutive years we facilitated the board strategy days for Scotland’s leading refugee charity. We planned and structured the day’s discussions, guided the conversations to ensure the aims were achieved and provided detailed reports.
In 2017 we also helped the organisation to canvas the views of staff, volunteers and service users to help inform their new five year strategic plan. We facilitated a handful of focus groups, gathering the views of the diverse participants and presented verbal and written reports on their feedback.
We also facilitated a group question and answer session as part of the recruitment of their new chief executive. A group of stakeholders including staff, volunteers and refugee champions met to quiz the final two candidates, near the end of the recruitment process. We facilitated the discussion and summarised the views of the group for the panel.