It’s part of how we do things around here

We’ve just come back from running an in-house Facilitation Skills training programme as part of a week of skills and competency building for 250 staff for an international client. Alongside our programme were Project Management, marketing and client-relationship training session offerings: demonstrating that awareness is growing in organisations of the need to develop facilitation skills as a core skill across many roles alongside other more established core competencies.

Building participation in multi-stakeholder working

Recently we were asked to design and deliver a consultative workshop for a research organisation. The workshop was a multi stakeholder event and participants came from a broad range of backgrounds including health professionals, volunteers, service users, project managers and carers.
It was important to ensure the workshop was inclusive, accessible and engaging. It was also vital that the workshop process enabled everyone to feel they could contribute and that their opinions were heard and valued. We designed a workshop that began with an introductory activity that enabled ‘connection before content’ in order to create a safe space for the group to work in. Following on from this we used a number of methods throughout the day that covered different learning intelligence preferences including visual spatial, verbal linguistic and both intra and inter personal. This enabled greater levels of participation and engagement ensuring that everyone could contribute their ideas. For those of you who’ve trained with us you’ll be very familiar with this approach! For a useful resource to learn more about multiple intelligence theory visit http://www.multipleintelligencetheory.co.uk/