Facilitation
What is a “Facilitator”?
The word facilitation is derived from the Latin ‘facile’ which, simply translated, means ‘to make easy’.
A facilitator is therefore someone who makes something easy for others.
For example, when you convene a group to accomplish a goal, we help you make sure everyone has a voice. We also design the flow so that the meeting runs smoothly and so you can get the right things done.
We can work with you to transition your in-person sessions to virtual or hybrid formats. Much of our work was virtual, even pre-pandemic. Our interactive virtual design and facilitation approaches emphasize strategies that increase participant engagement and productivity. We use a variety of visual methods which keep people engaged and involved.
For example, we can help you:
- design and develop the group activities that help you reach the outcomes you desire from your event
- align your activities to the goals and objectives of your meeting purpose (e.g., decision-making, problem-solving, team-building, etc.)
- facilitate discussions around hidden issues and topics
- capture the results and decisions of the meeting
- build more cohesive teams
- develop action plans and accountability check-ins to confirm progress, next steps or actions
- evaluate your meeting to determine the effectiveness or desired outcomes
We can partner on the following types of meetings and events:
- Strategic Planning
- Focus Groups
- Conferences & Summits
- Training workshops
- Large and small scale meetings
- Project Reviews and Walkthroughs
- Process Mapping & Process Improvement
- Issue Resolution
- Organizational Decision-making
- Board Meetings
- Staff and Board Retreats
- Problem Solving & Action Planning
- Team Performance and Team Cohesiveness
- Planning Meetings
- And more!
Why Hire a Facilitator?
Meeting facilitation is like an insurance policy for your important meetings or conferences. You want your meeting or conference to be successful.
The facilitator is the guide who helps your participants flow through the steps so that the desired outcomes are clearly created, understood, and accepted by all participants. They don’t just give you a smoothly running meeting (although that is definitely a benefit). Instead, the facilitator helps you get better RESULTS from your meeting.
A good facilitator will:
- Work closely with you to plan, design and deliver an experience for your participants that meets your needs and your goals
- Make sure all participants are crystal clear on the purpose of your session
- Help you decide the best people to invite to your session and design it so that everyone can do their best work together
- Keep people engaged and involved during the session
- Offer ways of documenting the results of the session in a way that helps you evaluate the outcomes of the session
- Remain neutral on the issues
- Build in flexibility so that the conversation can go where it needs to go.
You might want a facilitator if you have….
- A problem to solve, a team assigned, and no idea how to go about it
- Large project initiatives coming up and need community input on feasibility and potential issues
- A group that is dealing with a controversial issue and need a neutral facilitator
- An emotionally charged meeting or difficult decision or discussion that needs to move forward
- An opportunity to bring your staff together to explore big picture topics and think through how your work meets your mission
- Disparate groups or teams who need to collaborate on high-stakes initiative
- Geographically distributed teams and want everyone to work together collaboratively
- Virtual conferences or events with multiple concurrent sessions and/or speakers who are not skilled presenters
- Are trying to solve a complex or sensitive problem and members of a group can’t be neutral enough to facilitate themselves
- A need to get input from a variety of stakeholders
- Meeting after meeting where you can’t remember who was supposed to do what or you constantly revisit decisions and can’t get things done.