Methods

Every client’s situation is different, so I start by interviewing leadership and key team members before designing a process to suit your needs. Working backwards with the end in mind, I draw upon three key facilitation techniques to generate the specific results you need. Used together, they maintain the balance between connection (strong team chemistry and the collective intelligence that fuels creativity) and content (focused leadership and a good plan that drives action).

Civic Engagement

Pioneered by Peter Block, this model of conversation gets people intimately connected as it asks them to take responsibility for creating their own future. By focusing on possibilities rather than problems, requests rather than complaints and gifts rather than deficiencies, team and community members come together around common values, commit to an inspiring new future and contribute their gifts to making it happen.

Building on the relationships and commitments that arise from the intimate dialog of Civic Engagement, World Café Planning accesses collective wisdom to put meat on the bones of a team’s basic commitment. Widely flexible in application, this methodology asks people to build on each other’s ideas by moving from one small brainstorming group to another. And rather than debate the primacy of ideas, deeper solutions, patterns and questions emerge that no single person could have discovered alone.

Walt Disney himself developed this technique so that everyone in a meeting could see the plan (or the movie, the PowerPoint or the question) emerging from their thoughts. Everyone's ideas are captured on cards and pinned to large boards so that patterns and themes can be readily identified. People must literally stay “on the same page”—in this case 4’ x 4’ cloth covered boards—as incisive questions drive the discussion.