When clients come to me for in-house facilitation training, it’s such a great opportunity to create something which really supercharges people’s ability to have effective conversations about tricky things. There's some digging to do to unearth the treasure: what do you need to ask, to fit the training to what people most need to learn?

Why learn facilitation skills?

A tailored learning programme should start with getting under the skin of why the organisation needs to improve its skills:

What does the organisation need to be better, differently or more of, to meet its mission? Specifically, how do they see better facilitation skills contributing to this?
What kinds of meetings or workshops need improving: internal ones? Ones involving external organisations like member groups, partnerships and alliances? Ones involving stakeholders as consultees or collaborators? Or members of the public?
Are these meetings generally supposed to focus on information-sharing, or consultation, or decision-making / action planning in a collaborative style?
Is there a lot of conflict?

Who will be facilitating?

And the training can fit the learners really well.

Who are the people who need these skills? What can they already do well, and where are their learning edges?
Are they going to be using facilitation skills in situations where they can be a content-neutral process facilitator, or in situations where they also expect to be contributing content or advocating for a particular solution?
What about hierarchy: will they be facilitating conversations where some participants are more senior or have more authority, and how does that usually work in their organisation or context?

Different learning solutions for different needs

Sometimes there may be one set of people who need in-depth skills to help them identify really clear aims, design complex events and facilitate groups which may include all sort of difficult behaviours, and another set of people who really just need better meeting skills: agendas, chairing, notes. They will benefit from being trained separately with different learning interventions (e.g. three day sandwich course or two hour training session).

Making the most of having a critical mass of newly-trained people

As well as tailoring it to their particular organisational needs and learners, the great advantages of learning these skills with a cohort of colleagues is that you have a ready-made group of peers who can continue to learn together and reinforce what’s been learnt following the training. A shared language and set of approaches or frameworks makes putting the learning into practice so much easier. Plus learners can buddy up or meet in learning sets to continue the process of action and reflection, embedding their skills.

Are there already ideas or plans in place to help this happen?
Can you build in a (facilitated) conversation as part of the learning programme, so learners can decide together what to do?

How will the organisation use its newly-trained facilitators?

Maybe the facilitators are being prepared for an event or programme which is already planned. I have designed and run short but intensive training for staff of a sustainability organisation which was running a large conference cum planning workshop to promote and catalyse action around a healthy diet.

In some situations, the training goes alongside an existing or emerging set of guidelines and approaches about how meetings or workshops are ‘supposed’ to work in the organisation. This might include a formalised facilitation network made up of staff who, alongside their ‘day job’ can be called on to facilitate all sorts of meetings for the organisation, like the one I have helped to shape and train for the Environment Agency.

Or it might be that the learners are expecting to run the meetings they usually run, but better. In that case, they might commit together to some good practices like putting enough time into design and preparation, or to always ensure aims are clear before beginning a meeting.

Asking these questions ahead of time will help you design the right training, and may well spark new thinking by the person commissioning the training.

Co-created, thinking together

Thank you to all the clients, learners and co-trainers who have helped me refine this approach. And to the facilitators who joined a workshop session at the IAF Conference in Birmingham in October 2019, where we shared experience and tips.

Making the Path by Walking

This was first published in December’s Making the Path by Walking newsletter. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to subscribe.