How We Design and Lead Our Workshops

We use your input to design and customize the workshop.
To ensure that the workshop meets your needs, we invite you and your fellow participants to a conference call before the workshop. In the conference call, we identify what outcomes you need from the workshop, describe our proposed workshop design, and jointly determine whether to change the design to better meet your needs.

We teach principles and techniques.
Throughout the workshop we help you explore two basic questions:

1. What do I say and do in challenging situations?
2. What values and beliefs must I be holding in order to behave in this way?

We believe that you can improvise new methods and techniques for dealing effectively with challenging situations by understanding these underlying values and beliefs as well as a few basic methods, tools and techniques. Without this understanding, your effectiveness will be limited; you'll either rely on a particular technique or approach regardless of context or change them without knowing what will happen.

We teach the same principles and techniques to facilitators, consultants, coaches, trainers and leaders.
We believe that everyone in organizations needs facilitative skills, whether they serve as a team or organization leader, team member, facilitator, consultant, coach, or trainer. Most of our clients serve in more than one of these roles; the approach that we have developed and teach is equally fitting for all of these roles because it is based on general principles of effective interaction. This means that our approach can increase your effectiveness in each of these roles; executives, team leaders and members, facilitators, consultants, and trainers who use our approach can more frequently and powerfully help each other to increase their effectiveness.

We help you learn to reflect on your behavior.
We believe that a significant part of becoming a facilitative leader, facilitator, consultant, or coach is internal work—learning to think differently, especially in difficult situations. Consequently, in the workshop we create an environment in which you can safely explore how the way you are thinking may lead you unknowingly to act in ways that create the very results you are trying hard to avoid—misunderstanding, increasing conflict, defensive reactions, and the strained relationships and lack of learning that accompany them. This learning to rigorously reflect on your behavior helps you fundamentally change the way you approach difficult situations and relationships – and ultimately helps you get results on previously intractable problems.

We use an integrated approach.
Every aspect of your learning is focused on creating positive outcomes without generating unintended consequences. Each tool, technique, skill, value and belief that we teach is meant to be used in concert with every other; when you use them together, they become much more powerful than when used separately.

We use a variety of teaching and learning approaches.
To maximize learning for you and your fellow participants, our workshops are very interactive and combine discussion, role playing, video, and individual and small group exercises in addition to brief talks by us to introduce material. Throughout our workshops, you will gain direct exposure to our approach, as we model the values and skills that we are teaching – while we are teaching them. Some of the most valuable learning we can provide comes from your reactions to our modeling the approach we are teaching; because of this, we encourage you to be a critical consumer and raise questions and concerns.

We help you integrate our approach with approaches you currently use.
We believe that to use our approach effectively, you need to integrate it with the methods and approaches you currently use. To help you achieve this integration, before the workshop we ask that you identify the key methods or approaches that you currently use. During our workshops, we help you learn how to integrate these methods or approaches with our approach.

We provide individual coaching to each participant.
We believe that you and your fellow participants need detailed and extensive feedback to make sustainable improvements in your thinking and action. To ensure that you get sufficient skill practice and feedback, we provide an instructor for every six participants.

You use your own experiences to learn.
We believe that people learn best when they apply what they are learning to their own experiences. Throughout the workshop you use your own real examples to practice the principles and techniques. We do this in part by asking you to submit a case of a difficult conversation or facilitation you had in which you wanted to be more effective and to bring role plays of difficult conversations that you want to learn how to deal with more effectively.

You can use the workshop to accomplish real work.
To help you transfer your workshop skills to the "real world", if you attend the workshop with others you work with, you can use some of your skill practice time to have a real meeting on real issues. During your meeting, we will give group members feedback on how they are applying their skills. This structure provides a unique opportunity to determine the value of our approach in your work.

We ask you to prepare for the workshop.
So we can use our workshop time efficiently and effectively, we have advance reading and writing assignments. We ask you to read part or all of The Skilled Facilitator. We also ask you to write what we call a left-hand column case, in which you recall a difficult meeting or conversation you had or anticipate having in which you wanted to be more effective.

We include a coaching session after our longer workshops.
Our clients tell us that they usually leave our workshops with a great deal of enthusiasm for applying their learning, and high hopes for achieving previously unattainable results. They also tell us that they inevitably run into unexpected obstacles. To help you maximize your investment in this learning experience, we discuss these obstacles with your group at some point after the workshop, and jointly design approaches to dealing with them.

To learn more about each specific workshop we offer, or to register for one of our public workshops, click here.