Facilitation

Groups call on us for facilitation help when they have an important goal that they want to achieve, and aren't confident that the way they work together will get them there. We might work with you if your group is meeting to discuss a merger or acquisition, address a sensitive topic, or develop a market strategy, for example. Your group might be concerned about getting off track, not being able to handle conflict productively, miscommunication, interpersonal issues getting in the way, lack of trust, or your group members may feel that they are too close to the issues they are facing, and want someone present who's more neutral. Your group wants help in addressing these issues; the outcomes you're after are just too important to the group to risk going it alone. We call this work basic facilitation.

Sometimes our clients want this and more. Your group may not want to rely on outside facilitation help every time you have to have a high-stakes meeting or difficult conversation; your group wants to achieve its goal and build its capacity to work effectively together in the process. We call this work developmental facilitation.

Our facilitation clients contact us when they want their group to arrive at high quality solutions that members will actively support – long after the meeting is over. In basic facilitation, we would help you do this, build trust and minimize the time required to achieve your goals as well. After developmental facilitation, you achieve all these outcomes, and your group can independently handle difficult or high-stakes issues much more frequently. For more detail on our approach to working with groups as facilitators, please contact us.

If you think our approach to facilitation might be right for your group, the first step is to give us a call. In our initial conversation, we will ask you some questions about your situation to assess whether and how we think we might be able to help you. This is a good time for you to learn more about our work as well; because we try to act consistently with our approach to facilitation in all contexts, you'll get a real sense as to what it might look, sound and feel like to work with us as facilitators. A planning meeting is an important next step; this is a meeting with either the entire group we'll be working with (if feasible) or a representative subgroup. We'll work with this group to determine the purpose and process for the facilitation, and to find out if they have any reservations about us as facilitators. If the group agrees to move ahead, we meet at the scheduled time and facilitate the meeting or meetings. If we're working with your group developmentally, we'll return to work with you until you've achieved the level of group effectiveness you're seeking.

We are well known as the industry leaders in the area of facilitation – Roger Schwarz's book The Skilled Facilitator is a bestseller on the topic, and is a standard text in prestigious graduate management and organization development programs throughout the world. We're also authors of The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook, a practical support guide to The Skilled Facilitator. More important to us, however, is our clients' feedback; they routinely tell us that we help them resolve their issues in ways they didn't think possible.

If you are interested in learning more about our facilitation work, or think our facilitation services might be helpful for you, your group, your community or your organization, we'd like you to contact us. We'd like the opportunity to discover whether or not we can help you achieve success you didn't think possible.