Tag Archives: transformation

I’ve never been as inspired and energised – ToP facilitation case study

“I’ve never been as inspired and energised about the topic of data standards as I have been today with this fantastic group of people!” – Shelley Heckman on LinkedIn

Context

In late 2023 I was approached by Shelley Heckman of iStandUK to facilitate an away day of it’s Executive Board in London in March 2024.

The mission of iStandUK is to promote Data Standards that support efficiency, transformation, and transparency of local public services in the UK. The Executive Board includes representatives from local authorities, government departments and other representative groups such as the LGA, SOCITM and TechUK. The Board serves as both a programme board and a leadership forum for collaboration across the local public sector.

The March away day was to build on another just held in December, which had been an opportunity for the Board to start exploring a strategic approach to digital standards for local public services.

At that first meeting the group had looked at the question ‘what are the specific needs and ambitions of public services that could be addressed by standards?’ A visioning exercise followed, which allowed the group to explore what would be the impact of data standards being implemented across all public sector organisations in a way that creates the most impact. The group then explored what would be necessary from our group to achieve the collective vision. The day culminated with a number of action commitments, including to create a specification for a data standards business case for the UK local public sector.

Aims

In conversation with Shelley, Board Chair Phil Swan and Programme Director Paul Davidson, the aims of the March away day were agreed to be as follows:

To build on the conversation started at the December away day, to articulate what we are ready to commit to in relation to:

    • building a vehicle that supports interoperable standards across local government at a national level, what it might look like and the way forward to get there,
    • commissioning a scoping exercise for a vehicle for data standards, and the draft Specification paper,
    • iStandUK and its future, as that vehicle and/or otherwise.

To build upon the collective sense of the importance and urgency of interoperable data standards for the sector that was recognised in December, and to build commitment to influence budget holders to invest funds in a standards body.

Methodology and approach

For this assignment, I proposed to draw on the following of ICA’s Technology of Participation (ToP) methods in particular:

The Focused Conversation method provides a structured, four-level process for effective communication which ensures that everyone in a group has the opportunity to participate.

The Consensus Workshop method is a five-stage process that incorporates Focused Conversation for effective communication and that enables a facilitator to draw out and weave together everybody’s wisdom into a clear consensus.

Agenda & process

10:00 Arrivals & welcome refreshments
10:30 Opening, welcome & introductions; approach, aims & agenda

Our hopes & aspirations for today
11.00 The story so far – what do we know?

  • December workshop & outputs
  • December commitments & actions
  • Draft specification paper – Paul Davidson
  • iStandUK position – Phil Swan

Reflection
12.00 Lunch
12.30 Our commitment – ‘Consensus Workshop’

What do we hope that we are all ready to commit to – in relation building a vehicle, commissioning a scoping exercise, and iStandUK & its future?

What do we find that we are in fact ready to commit to? Are we ready to commit to work with such a vehicle? To help to fund it?
2.00 Break
2.15 Implications & next steps

What does this mean – for building a vehicle, commissioning a scoping exercise, iStandUK & its future, otherwise?
3.15 Reflection & close

What went well? What could have gone better?
3:30 End

Feedback and impact

Participants’ on-site feedback included:

  • Open and collaborative atmosphere
  • Energy and commitment from everyone
  • Great collaboration, great networking, great outcomes
  • Made more progress than I would have expected in time available
  • We got a better output than I expected
  • Excellent facilitation

Shelley wrote soon afterwards on LinkedIn:

I’ve never been as inspired and energised about the topic of data standards as I have been today with this fantastic group of people!

The iStandUK Executive Board met in London to talk ambitiously about our collective commitment to data standards for public services.

See also about me, how I work, who I work with and recommendations & case studies, and please contact me about how we might work together.

Facilitating collaboration, breakthrough and transformation – three new publications for 2021

I have been pleased to have the opportunity to contribute endorsements to three forthcoming books recently, and to be able to recommend them all wholeheartedly – see below.

I have been a fan of Adam Kahane’s writing since his 2004 book “Solving Tough Problems: an open way of talking, listening, and creating new realities”, so I was delighted to learn that his latest (forthcoming in August) would focus in particular on his facilitation practice.  For an in-depth preview, I recommend also the series of conversations he recorded with Carol Sherriff CPF|M in her Facilitation Diversely series for International Facilitation Week last year.

I have known Penny Pullan personally for I think at least as long as that, as a fellow IAF member and Certified Professional Facilitator, now also a CPF|Master.  I have widely recommended her 2016 book Virtual Leadership. I particularly appreciate that this next book (forthcoming in July), of our present time, addresses what it takes to ‘make workshops work’ irrespective of whether they are online or face-to-face or both.

I have met Gwen Stirling Wilkie only this past year, through the online meetups of IAF England & Wales. Her new book (published this month) captures beautifully for me something of the journey that so many of us have traveled this past year, as we and are clients have had to take all of our work online.

See Publications for more books and articles for which I have contributed an endorsement, foreword or editorial support, others that I have reviewed in a blog post or on which I have hosted a free facilitation webinar with the author, and some which I have authored or co-authored myself.

From Physical Place to Virtual Space, Gwen Stirling WilkieFrom Physical Place to Virtual Space: How to design and host transformative spaces online

by Gwen Stirling Wilkie (Feb 2021)

This book provides a fascinating insight into the theory and practice of Dialogic OD, and the heartening story of how an initially skeptical facilitator and her client found that they could apply this approach online via Zoom, during the 2020 pandemic, and be delighted with the results as well! Many of the practical tips that Gwen shares here have broader application to other facilitation approaches and platforms as well – a valuable resource.

Making Workshops Work, Penny PullanMaking Workshops Work: Creative Collaboration for Our Time

by Penny Pullan (Jul 2021 forthcoming)

This is a wide-ranging introduction and an invaluable resource for anyone leading any sort of workshop, whether in-person or online or both – it is packed with tips and tools and rich with insightful stories… highly recommended!

Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam KahaneFacilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together

by Adam Kahane (Aug 2021 forthcoming)

Facilitating Breakthrough is thoughtful, reflective, and inspiring. To achieve breakthrough results on high-stakes challenges, facilitators need to raise their game. This book explains how.

See also about me, how I work and who I work with, and please contact me about how we might work together. Please do not delay before contacting me – the earlier I hear from you, the more chance that I will be able to help and the more helpful I may be able to be.

Register now on Eventbrite for my free facilitation webinars, and for my regularly scheduled ToP facilitation training courses in London and Brussels and now online too.

Free facilitation webinar – Facilitating Authentic Participation: Transformative steps to empower groups

Facilitating Authentic Participation: Transformative Steps to Empower Groups

Are you interested to learn more about facilitation, and ICA’s Technology of Participation (ToP) in particular – in a free, one-hour, interactive online session that offers an experience of virtual facilitation as well? Register now on Eventbrite for this latest addition to my series of free facilitation webinars.

Facilitating Authentic Participation: Transformative Steps to Empower Groups

Tuesday 18 June 2019, 15.00 UK time 

In this session we will go behind the scenes of the usually hidden planning and diagnostic process that leads to the “magic” of guiding a group process that allows the group’s deepest wisdom to be shared in a feasible action plan that everyone is motivated to accomplish.

I shall be joined for this session by Jim Campbell, former ICA Belguim and IAF Europe Director and author of Facilitating Authentic Participation: Transformative Steps to Empower Groups; and again by Sunny Walker of the Virtual Facilitation Collaborative.

What may look simple, effortless, and easy to accomplish is the culmination of an intensive series of consultative stages of preparation requiring the listening, analytical, and collaborative skills of a master facilitator. This new book shares the process that Jim taught in university-level courses in Ireland, after a lifetime of innovative process work with groups on four continents.

Jim has written elsewhere:

“…people know that participating in creating their destiny is an essential part of their humanity… The process whereby people are enabled to experience this combination of the freeing of their humanity and the ownership which generates commitment and motivation is truly transformative. By the force of their own experience people realise that they can participate in creating their future and the future of their organisation or community.

Thus people experience themselves as responsible for their destiny, and so resignation and despair are transformed into hope and belief-in-self. People’s anger and frustration at their disenfranchisement is transformed into energy invested in creating their destiny.”

This conviction—that authentic participation is transformative—has been the foundation of Jim’s work as a facilitator.

Jim will share insights and stories from the book, and from his own wealth of experience of the facilitation cycle and the transformative power of facilitation. We will invite you to share your own reflections, insights and stories as well.

The book is available from Amazon (at the special review price of just $5 until 31 May) and from reputable booksellers – we do encourage you to read it before the session if you can! Read more about the book at ICA International, and join the conversation with Jim on Facebook.

Each session in this series is hosted in Adobe Connect for a highly interactive learning experience. Each topic is addressed by a short case study or other presentation, with links to further online material for later reference. In the sessions we apply tools and techniques of virtual facilitation to help participants to engage with the material and the presenter, and with their own and each other’s experience on the topic. A short technical orientation directly before the session introduces the features of the virtual meeting room, and the tools to be used. A brief closing reflection at the end of the session invites reflection and learning on the facilitation process and virtual tools, as well as on the content of the session

Register now on Eventbrite.

See also about me, how I work, who I work with and recommendations & case studies, and please contact me about how we might work together. Please do not delay before contacting me – the earlier I hear from you, the more chance that I will be able to help and the more helpful I may be able to be.

Register now on Eventbrite for my free facilitation webinars, and for my regularly scheduled ToP facilitation training courses in London and Brussels.

On the Road

This article was first written for and published in the IAF Europe MENA newsletter, May 2014.

Moscow facilitators planning ‘What can we do over the next 3 years to promote a culture of participation in our organisations?’Moscow facilitators learned the ToP Participatory Strategic Planning process last month by planning ‘What can we do over the next 3 years to promote a culture of participation in our organisations?’

When Julia Goga-Cooke invited me to contribute to this new ‘On The Road’ section of the newsletter, I think she may have known what sort of month I have been having. As well as visiting some interesting places, I have been able to meet and work with some wonderful IAF colleagues.

I began writing this from Marrakech, where I was facilitating last week for the first Arab Regional Forum on Youth Volunteering. This was convened by UN Volunteers, and brought together over 100 stakeholders from across the region and beyond to share, learn and plan together. On exchanging business cards with one delegate from Jordan, he told me that he had just emailed with IAF about joining or setting up a local chapter. So I was happy to share what I knew about the IAF membership in the region, and IAF’s chapter approach, and to learn from his experience of facilitation and facilitators in Jordan.

Prior to this I was in Turin with IAF member Michael Ambjorn of AlignYourOrg , in preparation for facilitating an event there together this week with the 120 staff of the European Training Foundation to celebrate its 20th anniversary this year. It was in designing this event, including a ToP ‘Wall of Wonder’ historical scanning process, that I had the idea for the rather more elaborate process to contribute to IAF’s 20th anniversary year celebration that became ‘Celebrating the development of facilitation – world-wide and history long’. This was launched in April, online and at the IAF North America conference in Orlando. Please do join in, online and at future conferences and chapter events between now and International Facilitation Week in October.

Prior to that, I was in Moscow at the start of April for the 5th annual Moscow Facilitators’ conference. It was great to be back, having attended for my first time last year and contributing a keynote and pre-conference ToP Group Facilitation Methods training. This year I presented a case study of the ToP Participatory Strategic Planning process with an international humanitarian agency in Geneva, ‘Transformational Strategy: from trepidation to ‘unlocked’’, and post-conference ToP Participatory Strategic Planning training (see photo above). The 100 or so participants came from the regions of Russia and Ukraine and Finland as well as from Moscow and the UK.

I have been privileged these last few weeks as well to serve as a mentor to one of ICA Ukraine’s ToP facilitation trainers, and to learn something of how she and ICA are working to network diverse actors in Ukraine and to re-envisage and rebuild their country’s future together. It was a privilege also (and fun!) to help to network ICA Ukraine’s facilitators with Russian facilitators attending the Moscow Facilitators conference by exchanging real-time Facebook updates between my post-conference ToP strategic planning course in Moscow and Natasha’s simultaneous ToP strategic planning course in Lviv.

It is a great disappointment to me to learn that this year’s IAF Europe MENA conference Facilitation Reloaded will no longer be held in Moscow, although recent events have made it increasingly self-evident that it would not be able to go ahead as planned. It seems to me that there is a need, now more than ever, for facilitation to grow and make a valuable impact in the region. I am delighted to know that the conference will be relocated rather than cancelled, and that the Moscow team will remain involved, and I shall be delighted for the opportunity to visit Copenhagen instead in October. I hope to see you there, and I hope that colleagues from Russia and Ukraine will be able to attend.

In the midst of all this I was also able to squeeze in a day of facilitation training with ICA:UK, for an international firm of sustainability consultants in London – happily, and rather appropriately, I was able to travel to that on foot!

Transformational Strategy: from trepidation to ‘unlocked’

I am pleased to share here [pусская версия ниже] a case study I presented at today’s 5th annual Moscow Facilitators conference, on ToP Participatory Strategic Planning with an international humanitarian agency in Geneva. Click on the hyperlinked images to go to other pages and sites with further information.

I am grateful to all at IDMC for allowing me to share the example of my work with them in Geneva, and to Edventure:Frome whose smaller-scale strategic planning exercise in Somerset I mention as well for contrast.

Many thanks also to Liudmila Dudorov and Mikhail Rossus, and all at GoTraining & IAF Russia, for hosting me so well again for my second year in Moscow (for a review of my first, see the Jazz of faclitation is magnificent in Moscow); and to all who attended the conference presentation and my post-conference course, ToP Participatory Strategic Planning.

.