The act of convening a group is an act of leadership.
It takes courage, skill and a belief in collective ability, that the group will do work that no one individual can achieve.
And when it works, it’s magic!
However, as you probably know, just putting a group of people in a room together is not enough to ensure effective collaboration, and this is where we can help.
We have extensive experience of designing and facilitating all kinds of meetings with all kinds of organisations, private, public and non-profit. You name it, we’ve probably done it.
We can bring all this to support you, at whatever level of involvement you need from us: either working behind the scenes to support your facilitation or leading the facilitation so that you join the discussion.
Typical types of meetings
- Strategy – we work with leadership teams and cross functional groups we support you to look at the big picture and develop a strategic touchstone for the long term. We all know the world is changing fast and we can’t predict everything so we have some particularly effective approaches to developing strategy in complex, fast changing environments, where conventional approaches do not work.
- Team development & team coaching – for teams who want to improve how they work together – whether this is to kick off a new team, or new leadership of a team or to refresh an established team, we are experts in team dynamics and can help teams reach new levels of effectiveness.
- Creativity and Innovation – we have experience and specialist techniques to support creative thinking in groups – whether you want creative problem solving for a complex challenge or blue sky thinking for new ideas, we can help.
- Planning – when you are bringing a group together to plan something, we can help design and support thinking through your goals and how you want to get there.
- Learning – after action reviews, project reviews – when people come together to reflect and learn from an experience it can be particularly helpful to have a neutral facilitator to ensure you harvest all the perspectives.
- Large groups – bringing a large group together does not need to be death by powerpoint – see below to find out about large group facilitation.
We can help!
Working with large groups
There is huge potential power in convening a large group of people because:
- Large groups hold breadth and depth of perspectives that mean they can navigate complex situations and develop robust ideas and solutions.
- A large group can build momentum to initiate change.
However, unleashing this potential requires a different way of working, that traditional conferencing and standard meeting practice does not achieve. There is an art and science to working with large groups. Whether it’s using an existing approach like Open Space Technology, World Cafés, Geek Speed Sessions, Future Searches or designing something entirely tailored, we are equipped to do what’s needed to ignite the power in large groups.
We can help!
Our graphic facilitation approach
We use a graphic facilitation approach to the way we work. By this we mean we use visuals, charts, Murals and storymaps to support group work
There is a power in working visually that transcends language and cultural barriers.
It engages people in the work they are doing together real-time and the visuals become a touchstone for aligned action beyond a meeting.
We have a network of amazing visual artists who can support your work in a variety of ways, from live graphic recording during an event to producing digital images that can be incorporated into your ongoing organisational communications.
For each project we match you with the perfect partner for the work.
A group achieves its highest potential when members are connected and free, and the group is both self serving and whole serving
Katherine Handy-Woods