Available Modules
Foundations of Facilitation
Foundations of Facilitation: Core Module
This is the Core Module of our flagship programme Foundations of Facilitation. As the foundation of the Bright Green Learning Academy, this core module will help you strengthen your skills and competencies to better design and run collaborative processes, workshops and meetings. It should be completed by those who wish to attend other courses on the Foundations of Facilitation programme.
Foundations of Facilitation: Designing Powerful, Purposeful Questions
What are the impacts of the questions you ask? How can purposeful, carefully-crafted questions help you achieve your desired outcomes? And how can ill-thought-through questions really hinder a process?
We believe that facilitating collaboration is all about asking great questions. You can know all the technologies and methodologies ‘in the book’, but it’s the questions you ask that make them powerful and purposeful, or not!
In this module, we consider the role and power of questions in collaborative working. We analyze questions: What data does it seek? What could be the impact of the question on the group? What might this tell you about the convener, facilitator or host’s assumptions? What are some variations on this question that might achieve different goals? We co-create a checklist of questions to ask yourself to ensure you’re crafting great questions in the future. And of course we practice refining this art!
The Self-Aware Facilitator: Preferences, Ethics, Values and Competencies
How is who you are affecting your professional practice? What are your behavioural preferences? And how are they manifesting in the way you collaborate and facilitate work with others?
We can be extrovert or introvert; we can be thinkers or feelers; we can be debaters or peace-keepers; and so on. What is key is that we know who we are, and that we have strategies in place to ensure that who we are affects our professional practice… for the good.
With reference to the diversity of diagnostic tools and assessments that you may have engaged with prior to the training, we explore these questions. And we help you develop customized strategies to strengthen your practice – using your personal preferences to the full where they strengthen your practice and managing them where they entail risks to the best outcome of your meeting, workshop or collaborative process.
Fostering Ownership and Self-Reliance in Collaborative Groups
To what extent are the collaborative groups of which you are a part dependent on you as the leader or facilitator of the process? To what extent are you valuably and dependably guiding the process, whilst also fostering ownership by all group members, and encouraging self-reliance?
This module explores these questions, guiding you through a self-reflection. It then provides you with a suite of approaches and methodologies to help you strengthen the design of your processes, minimize dependence on you (so that you can channel your energies into best facilitating collaboration rather than avoiding disintegration), and help you better foster ownership, self-reliance and group identity for greater resilience and results!
Articulating Intelligent Outcomes (Against Which to Measure Success)
What are the desired outcomes from the collaborative processes you are facilitating? What ‘hard’ outcomes and outputs are you looking for (such as decisions taken, a strategic action plan, a partnership agreement, key items prioritized, a written vision statement, a letter to policy makers)? What ‘soft’ outcomes (such as sense of commitment, enthusiasm and energy for going forward, improved relationships among group participants)?
Rarely is due attention given to both the desired hard and soft outcomes, and it is rarer still to see these articulated intelligently. And yet without all of the desired outcomes clearly stated and prioritized, how can you design processes to achieve them, and how can you measure success? With reference to case material, this module explores the importance of articulating intelligent outcomes; how to do so; and how to then design for success!
Balancing Focus on Tasks AND Group Dynamics
Do you struggle to keep track of group dynamics, getting swept up instead in the task and content of discussions? Or are you rather someone who gets swept up in the dynamics of the group and loses track of the task and content of discussions? We all have a tendency one way or another.
This module will help you identify strategies to achieve better balance. We place particular emphasis on mastering the art of designing processes and agendas that are structured, logical and outcome-driven; and at the same time flexible, allowing for flow and emergence. You will get design ideas to help you keep one eye on the group dynamics and an eye on process tasks, including ways of getting the group to help you!
Guiding Participant Engagement (Before, During, Between, and After Meetings and Workshops)
How well do you succeed in optimizing participant engagement throughout your collaborative processes? In many processes, meetings and workshops are used to generate great energy and ideas, however as soon as people leave the room this dissipates and engagement in the process quickly fades. So what can you do to guide and sustain participant engagement at optimal levels throughout a process?
In this module the trainers will help you think through and structure your own, bespoke answers to these questions – as you put in place an action plan to optimize participant engagement for greatest results – before, during, between and after meetings and workshops.
Encouraging Healthy Debate and Harmony
How do you make sure your desire for harmony doesn’t skew the process when debate may be beneficial / necessary? Or perhaps the challenge for you is rather how to make sure your desire for debate doesn’t hinder agreement and moving forward?
In this module we look at how to anticipate and explore potential areas of conflict. For instance, when debate and potential conflict is on the agenda, we look at how you can design for it using great techniques for exploring contentious issues whilst maintaining a generative group process. We consider also what to do when it arises, unanticipated. This course will give you the confidence to encourage healthy debate and also the know-how to stop debating (which may be something only a few of your participants are doing anyway) when it’s time to move things along harmoniously.
Capturing Outputs from Workshops, Meetings and Processes
Have you been a part of processes in which, only at a late stage, people start thinking about how to capture the outputs (and indeed identifying what these might be)? Or perhaps outputs have been diligently captured at the outset but there hasn’t been sufficient thought given to the purpose of collecting the outputs: Who are the outputs being captured for? What is it hoped they will do with the outputs? And how can the capturing process and the ‘product’ help them do so?
There are many questions for us to ask ourselves about what outputs are sought, and how to capture them. This module will provide you with a framework for ensuring you design for the purposeful capture of quality outputs.
Synthesizing and Summarizing Results in Workshops
As the process leader, convener or facilitator, when should you summarize and synthesize discussion for a group? When should the group do the summarizing and synthesizing itself? And what process design decisions can support summarizing and synthesizing for whoever takes on the task?
There are different views on these questions. We feel that those responsible for guiding processes should steer clear from summarizing subject matter and content discussions, sticking rather to summarizing progress in the process towards achieving desired outcomes. If you’d like to explore the reasoning and benefits from this, and learn more about how to design to facilitate summarizing and synthesizing, this is a module for you.
Clarifying the Facilitator’s Role with Groups
Would you appreciate greater clarity about your role in a process? Are you trying to balance bringing your subject matter expertise to a process, whilst also wearing a ‘facilitator’ or ‘convenor’ hat? Or perhaps you have little subject matter expertise and could do with some guidance to help build your stature and the confidence of others in you as a process leader or facilitator?
This module will help you with all of the above. It will provide you with all you need to contract (agreeing what you will do and will not do) efficiently and effectively with groups. And you will acquire strategies to ensure you bring all of your expertise to the collaborative process, appropriately!
Process and Agenda Design Clinic
Would you like some one-to-one coaching and advice on the design of your collaborative processes and agendas?
Apply your learning in this process and agenda design clinic. Bring your design to the session and receive real-time coaching and advice from the Academy trainers and fellow participants, and apply your learning by helping others strengthen their workshop designs.
Other Modules
Designing Strategic Review and Planning Workshops
Would you like help designing a Strategic Review and Planning Workshop?
In this session we consider what is specific to designing these events, and explore templates presenting a variety of design options. These are then customized, in-session. You will leave with re-usable templates, experience customizing these to create a draft agenda for an upcoming event (where relevant), and an action plan for finalizing and further strengthening the design afterwards.
Designing Multi-Stakeholder Consultation Processes
Would you like help designing a Multi-Stakeholder Consultation Process?
In this session we consider what is specific to designing these events, and explore templates presenting a variety of design options. These are then customized, in-session. You will leave with re-usable templates, experience customizing these to create a draft agenda for an upcoming event (where relevant), and an action plan for finalizing and further strengthening the design afterwards.
Designing Interactive Webinars and Workshops AND Practice Using Online Interactivity Tools
How can you make collaboration in virtual environments more interactive and outcome-oriented? How can you bring more energy and active participation to your online meetings? How do you keep one eye on process tasks and another on group dynamics when all you can see is your computer?
These are a few of the many questions we address in this 1.5-day module, helping you overcome challenges nurturing collaboration online by thinking through how you can combine some readily available online technologies with the best of your collaborative process design skills, and a little creativity!
Online tools are ever-more a part of our collaborative working practices. All the time new tools are being released, others becoming ubiquitous, and some obsolete. Together we’ll look at some of the online tools readily available today that seem to hold the greatest promise for facilitating collaboration and creating change, and have fun whilst practicing using them!
For this module, participants need to bring a laptop and headphones.
- Day 1: Design principles and elements for interactive web-based meetings, tour of online tools and demonstration of a highly interactive, facilitated webinar
- Day 2: (half day) Practice using online tools and application to an upcoming online webinar/workshop
Designing Team-Building Retreats (or “Advances”!) and Great Staff Meetings
Would you like help designing a Team-Building Retreat (or “Advance”)? Would you like help designing Great Staff Meetings?
In this session we consider what is specific to designing these events, and explore templates presenting a variety of design options. These are then customized, in-session. You will leave with re-usable templates, experience customizing these to create a draft agenda for an upcoming event (where relevant), and an action plan for finalizing and further strengthening the design afterwards.
Working With Large Groups: Designing Interactive Large-scale Workshops/ Conferences / Congresses
Would you like help designing interactive large-scale workshops, conferences or congresses? What works with really large groups?
This module builds your skills to design processes for very large groups. Bearing in mind both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ desired outcomes of processes, as well as other relevant parameters, you will consider the merits and applicability of diverse methodologies, and get creative proposing solutions to some challenging scenarios.
We consider what is specific to designing for large conferences and congresses, and explore templates presenting a variety of design options. These are then customized, in-session. You will leave with re-usable templates, experience customizing these to create a draft agenda for an upcoming event (where relevant), and an action plan for finalizing and further strengthening the design afterwards.
Using Interactive, Experiential Learning Games in Meetings to Communicate Messages (and have fun)
Do your workshops or meetings address or introduce complex subjects (from climate change to collaboration)? Are your participants incredibly diverse and need to better understand one another, break down barriers and work together in the future? Would you like your workshops and meetings to have more energy? These are some of the reasons that the integration of interactive, experiential games into a workshop or meeting can be beneficial.
This module will explore how to use games most effectively and appropriately to help communicate desired messages. You will learn about different categories of games, the diverse contexts in which they can be applied, and improve your skills as a games administrator. We will play a number of learning games, practice choosing, framing, briefing and debriefing them, and also learn how to make our own games for diverse contexts.
Introduction to Systems Thinking Tools to Improve Your Strategies
Does your work involve strategic thinking, communicating dynamic and complex topics and inter-connections? Does it involve encouraging people to expand their time frames from short term to longer term thinking, building scenarios for the future, and planning strategic actions that reduce gaps between what we want to happen and what will happen if nothing new is undertaken?
The systems thinking field provides a set of valuable concepts that help process leaders and conveners to better communicate complex challenges and inter-connectedness. In this module we will explore a number of systems thinking concepts. We consider how to apply them to our work, the questions we need to ask ourselves when planning a project or when we are not seeing as much progress as we would like to. Systems tools that you will practice developing include behavior-over-time graphs and feedback loops.
Practicing Facilitation and Participatory Methodologies
Have you read or heard about a number of facilitation approaches and group participation methodologies that you find interesting and would like to try? Perhaps you’ve experienced them run by others and are keen to try and use them yourself? Or maybe you’d simply like to discover something new to add to your ‘toolbox’ to meet a specific need?
This session is all about practicing a set of our favorite 8 methodologies in a safe environment, in order to learn experientially about the steps involved – from set-up to debriefing, and how to adapt them to different audiences – for greatest success.
Facilitating Work with Multi-cultural Groups
Does your work involve convening and leading processes with highly diverse participants?
Whether this diversity stems from cultural aspects, sectoral perspectives, organizational culture, language affinity, what department people sit in, or even just individual differences, there are a number of useful cross-cultural communication concepts and tools that can help build your own awareness, and strategies for facilitating multi-cultural groups, and working across cultures, with the view to making your processes more productive!
Process and Agenda Design Clinic – Real-Time Feedback and Coaching on Agenda Designs
This module is for seeking and sharing design advice or coaching on designs-in-progress!
Would you like some one-to-one coaching and advice on the design of your upcoming workshop/meeting agenda?
Having been approached by many participants in our courses for this service, we decided to design it into our training programme. Bring your upcoming meeting/workshop/conference design to this session and receive real-time coaching and advice from the Academy trainers and fellow participants.
If you don’t have a design to share, join this course to work with the group and participate in a “client consultation” process that will give you tips on how to clarify outcomes, select appropriate participatory methodologies, and ask great questions when designing results-oriented agendas.
Capturing Learning Throughout Collaborative Processes
So, what are the lessons learned? What is “reusable” in our learning and how can we capture it for re-use (by ourselves and others)? How can we reintegrate our learning into our process to strengthen it as we go forward?
These questions are often left to the end of a collaborative process, at which time much of the detail will already have been forgotten, and opportunities to strengthen the process and course-correct might have been missed.
This module will help you design the capture of feedback and learning into the whole of the collaborative process, from conception to conclusion. It provides you with a framework for thinking through what you want to capture, how you will capture it, how you will use what you have captured to inform the collaborative process going forward. And what you will do with it so that others can benefit from your learning in the future.
