Facilitation Services
Business | Education | Community
Custom
design and facilitation of highly interactive processes for gatherings
of all sizes.
Larger groups a
specialty.
Workshops for alignment, stimulating innovation, changing direction,
making sense of the situation, developing plans for implementation,
getting things done.
Conferences & Meetings,
Kick-off meetings, annual retreats, issue
resolution, strategic planning, problem-solving, decision-making, and
feedback meetings,
Cultural change, Intelligent Team Games, experiential learning.
Key Tools used:
UFacilitate: QUEST Change Track; Change Facilitation Toolkit
| The World Cafe; Open Space
Technology; Dialogue; Strategic Questioning, the intelligent team game,
experiential learning
Mentoring & Coaching Services:
Mentoring and coaching Facilitators and
Change Agents through
change programs
Design Services:
Design & Scripting of large scale and complex
group experiences
When to use a
Facilitator
Conferences;
Mergers
& Acquisitions;
Restructures& Relocations;
Team Building; Kick-off
Meetings;
Strategic Change;
Reorganisation;
Cultural Evolution;
Knowledge sharing;
Problem
solving;
Workshops;
Whole company meetings;
Market
research;
Strategic
planning;
Interactive MC
-
Kick-off sales and marketing conferences
that provide
a unique and memorable experience for participants
-
Meetings
that set strategy, align culture, put plans into action and sustain
change.
-
Innovation programs that stimulate cross function communication and
knowledge sharing.
-
Scalable meetings from a few to
many hundreds using a consistent set of tools and processes.
-
Extraordinary teambuilding
activities, either indoor or outdoor using the latest self
organising technologies.
-
Achievement of maximum results in minimum time.
What if your lowest paid
employee has within them the idea that will grow and sustain your
business for a lifetime? How would you know? How will you find out?
Everything you need for a lifetime of
success in business and life is already available either within you
and within your reach - you just don't know it yet. That you or your
lowest paid employee, have the seeds to next big idea or a solution to
that problem is not as crazy as it sounds.
Whilst strategy and direction come from
the hierarchy, innovative ideas and solutions are available
everywhere. By aligning formal structures with and informal networks
you'll be able to solve problems and apply strategy with unexpected
ease.
We will change your world by
helping you tap into the inner resources of you and your team. Our role is to help you facilitate business growth,
performance improvement, strategy & innovation, sustainable change and
corporate & personal healing. You will benefit from improved sales and
profits, continuous innovation, clear strategy, increased energy, full
buy-in to change, reduced fear and elimination of blame.
We do this by working
with business owners, leaders, change agents, boards of directors, partners,
employees, customers and other stakeholders to:
-
Bust
silos and bureaucracy to enable the free flow of information and
knowledge sharing to stimulate innovation.
-
Reconnect with
corporate values that may have been diminished through past excesses
and poor leadership options.
-
Rekindle leaders, employees, directors and
stakeholders belief in themselves.
-
Assist leaders struggling with siege
mentality generated by decades of blame, change fatigue and resistance
to new initiatives.
-
Improve corporate fitness through faster
and more effective problem diagnosis and decision making
-
Facilitate
effective, energising meetings, conferences and workshops that
continually rebuild culture and fully engage participants.
We serve organisations
of
all sizes and in all sectors. Our clients range Australia's best
known brands
to SMEs and
individual leaders and change agents.
Change Facilitation Applications
Strategic Change
Reorganisation
Knowledge Sharing
Cultural
Evolution
Corporate Healing
Meetings:
Creativity and Innovation
Silo Busting
Stakeholder Engagement
Strategic Change
Businesses
are continually evolving in order to survive and prosper. The creation of a strategy is increasingly an evolving process
rather than a fixed project. Such a process needs to engage larger
numbers of people in the organisation to ensure that all relevant facts
are considered and that optimal solutions are created. Such wider
participation also ensures greater degrees of ownership and
understanding to enable successful change.
We have
the tools & processes to help clients in the following types of situations:
Business team planning events; Strategic business meetings; Sales conferences and sales management events; Top-team reviews and ad-hoc issues resolution sessions; Cross function meetings; Whole company planning
meetings
Reorganisation
A frequent
response in trying to bring about better performance is to restructure
or establish new functions. The key issues are to establish some rapport
within the group of people, to understand each others' roles and how
they can work together. Inevitably, it takes time to establish a fully
performing team but the process can be accelerated by an early workshop
to create a more effective team.
We have
helped new or restructured teams in variety of situations including:
Functional start-ups
and role changes; Mergers and
acquisitions; Integration of
business teams and functions into larger businesses
Knowledge sharing
Most
of the required knowledge lies within the organisation but can be
readily supplemented with small amounts of expert knowledge. Hence we
have helped clients by designing and facilitating workshops which use
internal expert presenters for disseminating requisite knowledge to a
wider audience. Content experts have been included as appropriate.
Examples of
such workshops are:
Innovation programs; Cross function
communications; Silo busting; Leadership
development
Cultural
Evolution
People in
organisations often behave in similar ways because they share the same
values and beliefs (at least to some extent). This enables more
efficient communication and working. Hence the interest in 'changing the
culture'. However cultures evolve over many years and are unlikely to be
changed overnight other than by radical management overhaul and even
then culture can endure. Even with this proviso, culture is an important
and pervasive issue which needs to addressed.
We have
worked with clients to influence culture:
Integrating
businesses with very different histories; Creating customer
focus; Building common
vision; Creating networks and
team working
Corporate
Healing:
As corporate healers we provide essential therapy to businesses
traumatized by mergers, acquisitions, restructures, market shake-outs,
extended below par performance or leadership change.
Our methods help
eliminate ingrained fearful, negative and self limiting cultures that lead
to high levels of staff turnover, stress and sick leave and missing
performance targets.
We do this by developing
leadership skills, stimulating cross functional knowledge sharing and
communication, team reconstruction, whole business involvement in strategy
planning, self coaching systems for all employees, stimulating creativity
and innovation and above all having fun at work.
Meetings:
The business case for better
meetings is clear. Terrible meetings seriously impact business
performance. The opportunity time lost in appalling meetings is
irrecoverable. The ROI on the massive time invested in dreadful meetings
cannot be justified.
The seven deadly sins of
meetings as published in Fast Company Magazine April/May 1996 include:
-
People don't take
meetings seriously
-
Meetings are too long
-
People wander off the
topic
-
Nothing happens after
the meeting - no action
-
People don't tell the
truth
-
People aren't prepared
for meetings -critical data missing
-
Meetings never seem to
improve
Underlying Principles
-
Group facilitation skills and tools are more
valuable to effective leadership outcomes than presenting and
influencing.
-
Poorly conducted meetings will undo every
positive strategic, cultural and innovation initiative
-
Well conducted meetings significantly
increase employee engagement and buy-in
Creativity
and Innovation:
Steps towards innovation
-
Understand the nature
of creativity
-
Develop creativity
across the business
-
Eliminate barriers to
creativity
-
Transform creativity
into innovation
-
Turn innovation into
sustainable strategic competitive advantage
Silo Busting
What
could be achieved if innovation and performance were seamlessly
integrated?
The organisational structure
providing the highest energy merges the informal network that drives
innovation with the formal structures that drive performance. The
result is a fast flowing, errorless processes that
deliver outputs seamlessly to customers whilst achieving mutually
shared objectives.
Yet this vision is
only rarely attained due to ‘silos’ that create barriers between
teams. Silos undermine
the effectiveness of the organisation, drain energy, slow
responsiveness times, limit innovation and create political
cultures focused more on internal issues than delivering products and
services to
customers.
In order to respond quickly to
customer needs and to drive change and innovation. We will help
employees to work effectively with others beyond their
own teams. We call this "Silo Busting".
"Silo Busting"
is about breaking down the debilitating silo walls. We
provide leaders with commonsense tools and processes that can be used
for immediate impact and which enable more effective integrated
communication and cross team collaboration.
Silo Busting tools can be quickly learned and used by leaders and
change agents within organisations so that new practices can become
self sustaining.
Stakeholder Engagement
How much more could
be achieved if everyone were fully engaged in the change process?
Engaging
employees, suppliers, customers is becoming harder and harder.
Big table meetings, PowerPoint presentations are now old hat and
'talking to" people can be a waste of time. Cutting up
the boardroom table into small pieces is recommended.
People are best engaged in a small table meeting, like a cafe. As soon
as more than six people sit around a big table, the dynamic changes
significantly. The big table power power play reduces the
effectiveness of that meeting and buy-in from the participants.
We
will teach you "small table" techniques that will reduce the time
spent on meetings whilst significantly increasing the potential for
better, more informed decisions.
