I believe meetings, conferences and kicks offs are an essential part of organisational life. I also believe that well planned and executed ones can make all of the difference to organisational success. Correctly done they can raise engagement, accelerate transformation and ensure strategies are achieved.
I make meetings, whether online, face to face or blended, far more productive and time well spent. My expert facilitation propels teams and organisations into the future with more dialogue, direction, energy and engagement.
This is HOW I do this:
1 – Clarifying and setting boundaries – I work with key stakeholders to design a process that has clear goals, roles, responsibilities and deliverables.
2 – Remaining impartial – I influence the group to achieve the agreed objectives. My work is not as the expert or decision maker, but rather the encourager of ideas and outcomes.
3 – Understanding intra and interpersonal dynamics – With over 25 years of leading meetings & conferences and a solid grounding in connected disciplines, I can read the currents and issues that come out in the non-spoken language and help participants deal with the tough subjects.
4 – Intervening when required – I am at my most useful when the team hardly notice I am there and the great work gets done by themselves. I am ready though, to step in and deal with sticking conversations or help people work through conflict.
5 – Stretching performance – I aim, at a minimum to achieve the goals set for a meeting or conference. I try, when possible, to get people to stretch their ideas, possibilities and plans to be more creative and bolder than they could imagine. I draw on my coach training and experience to do this.
The key areas of facilitation I engage with are:
Business Strategy
Supporting organisations to clarify where they are going and why. I can provide a series of different planning frameworks to supports the analysis of current strategies and create workshops to craft, model and iterate new ones. In the process we can pull on a range of stakeholders, both internal and external to provide a broader and more accurate view of the world, as well as use sense-making tools to better understand what may happen going forward.
Product & Service Innovation
Supporting organisations to work internally or in partnership with current or potential customers to extend product or service life and create new offerings. I use a range of facilitated processes, including “innovation games” to get a better voice of the customer and help teams / departments really think outside of their “box”. Beyond the new service or product I also help look at new business models for those offerings and coach the team through experiments in order to accelerate the iterative design process. Beyond pure facilitation, I am able to train people on innovation tools and techniques and coach innovation leaders to drive success.
Business to Business Sales
Business to business sales has got more complex as more people on the client side are involved and buying cycles have elongated.
- Visual Account Planning – A visually driven customer centric process that starts with understanding the clients business model and strategy and then aligning your companies products and services to their needs. We then progress on to stakeholder mapping and finally business proposition pitch development.
- Visual Territory Planning – Helping your sales teams better understand where and how to invest their time over the account sets they are responsible for.
- Partnering – Helping organisations be more effective in the alliances they have in their joint go to market approaches.
Organisational transformation and alignment
Change and strategy execution only occur if everyone is engaged. I design and run workshops, events and internal conferences to allow people to get engaged in and understand how to move forward. This can be from working with a core planning team through to working with the whole organisation or cross sections of it. I bring to bare a range of methodologies to support dialogue and clear communication including
- Future Search
- World Café
- Open Space
Team development
As a facilitator I engage with teams in three principal ways:
Team building – Accelerating the performance of a new team by creating strong personal connections, clarifying ways of working and getting alignment around priorities.
Team re-building – Supporting lower performing teams to get back on track through a blend of team coaching and facilitation.
Team acceleration – Helping successful teams raise their level of performance to their next level by enhancing their communication and support for each other.
Red Teaming
Red teaming, with its roots in military doctrine, is a facilitated process to challenge your thinking, strategies, plans or ideas in order to ensure that you have considered all of the options and potential threats to any decision or investment you would like to make.
Depending on the complexity of the project I work alone, or bring in to support me, experienced CXO’s or ex-military personnel to work with your senior leaders to assess the quality and validity of your strategies, plans and ideas.
Each engagement is different, but we always aim to use a range of tools and techniques to stress test your ideas in order to expose shortcomings or potential weaknesses. We do this with the intent of building more robust plans and projects that will ensure your investments are well spent and decisions well made.
These techniques can be used for:
- Evaluating strategies
- Enhancing complex projects
- Testing new product/ service ideas
- Vetting mergers and acquisitions
- Assessing and improving the quality and capability of the thinking of senior leaders
I can facilitate in Spanish and English and whilst based in central London, I regularly travel for work internationally and am very comfortable designing and running meetings, events and conferences using virtual platforms.
Trained internally in 1996 in facilitation, I have held the Certified Professional Facilitator designation from the International Association of Facilitators since 2010, THE only internationally recognised facilitation body and certification globally.