Preparation, content creation, expert facilitation: The facilitation trifecta

You are taking your team out of the office for a strategic planning day, but you’re nervous. After all, that’s a lot of your team’s time – 20% of their week in fact – and there is significant effort and cost required to deliver such an event. 

The comments from cynical team members after the previous offsite are ringing in your ears … ‘our last workshop was good, but nothing has happened since’ … ‘it turned into a talk fest, with no concrete outcomes’…

Your CEO suggests … ‘Get an external facilitator’… and you think … great plan, but where to start? After all, you don’t just want a time keeper – you could do that yourself. So, you head to Google … but finding, and ultimately engaging, the right facilitator feels like pot luck. And getting what you really need feels a lot like backing a Melbourne Cup trifecta. Chance!

At Strategic Facilitators, our expert facilitators will turn your facilitation decision from chance, to winning the trifecta! 

1. Deep preparation to engage and challenge participants
2. Engaging and relevant content creation with access to structured frameworks and extensive approaches to strategic thinking and planning
3. Expert facilitation skills to ensure concrete and actionable outcomes at the end of the day

Deep preparation

At Strategic Facilitators, we:

• work closely with our clients to agree workshop goals and objectives and clarify the results they want to achieve
• develop an agenda and detailed session plans to engage and challenge participants
• prepare visually engaging pre-reading and presentation materials
• clarify roles, including the role of the leader (and agree with the leader how they will engage during the workshop)
• are process oriented and will do the thinking and planning (ie. brief presenters, engage Directors etc)

Content creation

At Strategic Facilitators, we:

• are independent and bring an external perspective
• develop a working knowledge of what the organisation does (direction, challenges, opportunities, context) and understand group dynamics
• develop an understanding of the industry
• bring structured frameworks and thinking to the discussion to achieve better outcomes
• consider what content is required to support effective, robust decision making (and develop this content if required)
• bring expertise depending on the topic and what is important to you e.g. strategy, change leadership, organisation development

Expert workshop facilitation

At Strategic Facilitators, we:

• guide participants through a series of intensive, innovative, and participatory exercises which foster creativity, motivation, and a shared commitment to results
• use high-quality, tailored presentation materials and aids to stimulate and guide discussion
• manage the room and disparate views; guide discussions and don’t interrupt where possible, allowing participants to resolve issues
• manage distractions; don’t get side tracked by strong views; ensure everyone has the opportunity to participate
• ask open questions and draw out unspoken issues
• practice hard listening and fact processing to efficiently synthesise discussions and conversations
• deliver concrete outcomes (and action-ready documentation) through the use of evidence-based decision-making and expert facilitation techniques.

Don’t rely on chance; you can bet on our team and win the facilitation trifecta!

Our team has more than 100 years of collective experience facilitating workshops, and between us we have facilitated well over 1000 executive team and board workshops, strategy workshops, conferences and team offsites. Our workshop facilitators have all worked for top-tier management consulting firms, including McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Booz & Company and Accenture, or been trained by people who have.

We encourage you to think of facilitation as being more than ‘just coming on the day and guiding discussions’. We know there is more value to add, and an expert facilitator can, and should, be armed to unlock that value.

Want to know more? 

For more information on how our facilitators can help you with your next Board, Executive Team or staff workshop, meeting or offsite, please contact us below or call the office on 03 9428 8817.