Interactive & Engaged!

Overview

Our facilitators are conference facilitation experts who understand a broad range of interactive, experiential “best practices” methods that have been drawn from over thirty years of proven, research-based large and small group facilitation.

We understand how to engage your audience and your content with highly effective facilitation methods, formats, and exercises that go far beyond “death by PowerPoint”.

To get you started, here is an initial gallery of possible methods and approaches that our facilitators have used to configure powerful creative retreat and conferences agendas.  Depending on your needs, there may be excellent, innovative ways to engage your audience and your content—differently:

Creative Group Engagement Methods

Break-Out Groups

Break-Out Groups are customized, facilitated small team dialogue exercises on specific real-world issues and opportunities for engagement and resolution.

• The Break Out Group process builds high degrees of teamwork, communication and collaboration on high impact issues, and leads to preliminary recommendations and action plans that are shared back in full group for open dialogue.

• “Take away” action plans and action teams are assigned during and / or after the conference for results-based implementation. This also creates an ROI and ROO (return-on-objectives) for your conference investment.

Open Space

Open Space is a facilitated, innovative group engagement method that helps a group surface key issues, opportunities, and important topics in a LIVE format.

• The group “self organizes” around the high priority issues into small teams, based on where there is the most passion, energy and volunteers to develop an initial solution to the issue.

• The small teams report back to the full group for open dialogue, and action teams / plans are made to resolve the issues and to implement solutions after the retreat.

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry methods engage groups in a positive thinking, “strength finding” planning process to build a desired outcome or future state based on what is working well in an organizational system or team.

Teams focus their action plans based on expanding and building out on “strengths” and positive behaviors that bring energy and life to a complex situation.

The Café Model

The Café Model is a facilitated, highly interactive group engagement process that generates and captures a group’s collective intelligence and key ideas & solutions for an issue that needs positive change.

• The Café model sets the conference room space with small café tables with brainstorming materials.

• Each table is a key location where small teams explore one or two central questions on the focus issue, then rotate at timed intervals to different tables, collectively carrying their insights from table to table and building a body of collective insights and creative solutions.

• There is a facilitated full group summarizing session that pull through the group’s collective intelligence and leads to a variety of next steps or action planning opportunities.

Strategic Planning

Conference-based Strategic Planning processes are facilitated, “fast track” strategic thinking & planning sessions that involve an initial strategic situation assessment and prioritization of needed responses to the situation.

• The facilitator then helps the leaders / teams define a working strategy and envision key strategic initiatives to respond to the important trends, opportunities, or threats they perceive; and facilitates large and small group collaborative action planning for subsequent operational execution. 

Project Planning

Retreats and conferences can be excellent venues to launch or build successful project teams or key initiative teams. Our facilitators can provide expert project planning and project management coaching to organize Project Charters, Task Plans, Responsibility Assignments, Project Schedules, and much more.