Want to turn ideas into actionable outcomes? Then you need the A-Team!
Why you might need a facilitator
When people had a problem and when no one else could help, that was the time to call in the A-Team. Professional facilitators may not travel in black transit vans with red alloys and a stripe, but they are equally formidable at creating the environment to develop permanent capability.
You may be wondering why a facilitator is even needed? Ask yourself a question, when was the last time your company had a great workshop?
Think back to the last workshop you were involved with. I’m sure at the time it probably felt like a positive and productive session with everyone in the room was coming up with good ideas, suggestions, and solutions. However, the following day when looking through the flip chart pads and sticky notes you realise there isn’t much output to show for it. There are no actionable objectives, no conceived solutions, just some half-formed ideas that will need a lot of work. What the workshop delivered was a pile of seed ideas, not actionable ideas.
The power of facilitation
Seed ideas are valuable and as the saying goes ‘from little acorns, mighty oaks grow’. However, ideas need to be spoken out loud because these seeds are the springboard from which others can evolve and create actionable ideas. Seed ideas need to germinate, not just be written on a sticky note or a whiteboard and left forgotten.
This is when facilitators come into their own, moving people from seed ideas to actionable ideas. Let me give an example; if a department head has an objective to improve the performance of their team, the seed idea might be to improve the capability of managers to coach their teams. The actionable ideas generated will be to:
run coaching training courses
host lunch and learn practice coaching sessions
embed a coaching session in all appraisals
role model coaching by senior leaders
organise action learning sets with managers to unblock any issues when trying to coach.
Ask two powerful questions to reach actionable ideas
With our facilitation workshops, the focus is to develop permanent capability within the company and embed it into the culture. How do we do this? When facilitating workshops, there are two simple questions we ask:
How are you going to do that?
Give me an example?
Simple but powerful.
If you don’t have the facilitation skills in-house, then it makes perfect sense to bring in the A-Team to design and facilitate a workshop for you. Alternatively, our Facilitation Skills Training builds permanent in-house facilitation capability.