The Power of Facilitated Sessions
Facilitated sessions are team-based approaches to communication and involve the design and delivery of interactive workshops to extract high-quality consensus based information in compressed timeframes to meet a predetermined set of deliverables.
The idea of facilitation has been around since the 1970s and was originally developed by IBM Canada as part of its Joint Application Development (JAD) approach to better application design. A trained independent facilitator will have a wide range of skills and techniques within their repertoire and will likely be knowledgeable and adept in such areas as group development, advanced communication and listening, group dynamics, conflict resolution, creativity and innovation.
Whilst facilitated sessions and facilitation skills were originally designed for use within the world of IT, they are now routinely used in a wide variety of areas such as strategy planning, requirements analysis, project planning, problem analysis and resolution, conflict resolution, creativity and innovation.
Having spent most of my career in consulting, I can vouch for the significant difference that facilitation skills can make in obtaining extremely high-quality information within very tight timescales. As a consultant, I have to say that I personally consider facilitation skills as a career enhancer and differentiator. When all those around you are losing their heads and chaos abounds – facilitation skills can provide invaluable clarity and a way to see through the complexity that surrounds you.
Facilitated sessions are particularly powerful and effective in situations that are characterised by multi-direction communication and complex stakeholder environments. Facilitation can be especially useful in highly-charged politically sensitive and contentious discussions.
Facilitated sessions can make a significant difference for tasks such as strategy planning, scenario planning or exploring potential directions for a business and is obviously directly relevant to senior teams and away-days. Facilitation can also radically improve the effectiveness of teams at any level of an organisation – particularly when embedded in everyday activities by training key individuals and providing a real catalyst for change.
Sound interesting?
We’ll be exploring a range of facilitation skills and techniques over the course of the next couple of weeks, and we’ll try to make this little-known area a bit clearer. Hopefully, you’ll begin to see how facilitation and facilitated sessions for strategy planning, away-days, scenario planning etc. can make a real difference in performance and drive radical change in an organisation. Alternatively, facilitation skills training can help you develop better and more effective ways to explore and solve all kinds of problems.
Powerful stuff. Stay tuned for more on this topic.
You may also be interested in exploring our range of facilitation skills training courses held at our fabulous Booths Hall premises in Cheshire (or in-house for our clients across the UK).
Tags: catalyst for change, complex stakeholder environments, contentious discussions, creativity and innovation, Facilitated Sessions, Facilitation Skills, JAD, Joint Application Development, strategy planning
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