CJBryan's blog

I’m interested to know if you or your company use external facilitators when you are running group exercises, and how you go about finding the right person to do the facilitation. For examples would you consider using an outsider to run strategy setting, forward planning or scenario planning workshops. If so, which person in your company would you go to to find a facilitator for example HR, Training, Office Manager etc?

I have had an interesting, in the Chinese sense, couple of weeks. It occurred to me that many of the assignments I had worked on recently had a large degree of facilitation involved. This is one of my core skills and something that I enjoy doing, so it made sense to offer this as a service in its own right. Consequently, I have packaged it as Intelligent Business Facilitation. You can read all about it on my main site here. There is reasoning behind the naming too.

This week I was going to write about how the SWOT framework can be used to structure a discussion and get you started on your annual planning process. Typically, I use PEST and SWOT frameworks together in a workshop forum; encourage the participants to talk openly and use the framework to record and organise the results.

It’s very rare that an organisation has the opportunity to start something from clean sheet. Organisations develop organically over a long period and become used to a degree of inefficiency and inflexibility, rather like owning an old pair of comfortable but tatty slippers. Processes that have been established for a long period of time become entrenched so deeply into the organisation that they become subconscious, and rapidly become ingrained as “the way things get done around here”.