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Facilitation Stories

By: IAF England Wales
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  • Summary

  • Facilitation: the art of enabling a group of people to achieve a common goal. IAF England Wales brings you a show by facilitators, for facilitators and anyone interested in using facilitation for change. We'll share guest stories, experiences and methods. Plus, we'll bring you up to date on what's happening at our Meetups.
    ©2022 IAF ENGLAND AND WALES CHAPTER
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Episodes
  • FS67 - Public Dialogue with Suzannah Lansdell

    FS67 - Public Dialogue with Suzannah Lansdell
    May 21 2024
    In this episode Nikki talks to Suzannah Lansdell about Public Dialogue. Suzannah is a freelance facilitator who also advises organisations on how to do public and stakeholder dialogue, particularly in the science and technology sector for Sciencewise. They talk about Public Dialogue as a process bringing together members of the public with specialists and policy makers to discuss complex and controversial topics and gather public insights on the issues without necessarily coming to firm recommendations; “this is this is not a Focus Group. It's not kind of top of mind views. It's digging behind that” How members of the public are engaged to take part; The role of a facilitator in Public Dialogue and how it’s different from other types of facilitation; Some recent topics for Public Dialogue including Embryo Research, Future Flight and the role of Data; The experience of participants and how this differs from other consultative processes; “one of the key things about Public Dialogue as you give people the time to kind of wrestle around the issue and think more deeply.” How information is shared with participants, including striking a balance on the level of detail and the importance of including a diverse range of specialist perspectives; Evaluation in Public Dialogue and the focus on monitoring longer term impacts from the process; Suzannah’s hopes and expectations for the future of Public Dialogue, becoming more embedded in policy making and democratic processes. A full transcript is below. Links Today’s guest: Suzannah Lansdell on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/suzannah-lansdell-ab23a78 Today’s subject Sciencewise: https://sciencewise.org.uk/ Involve Resources: https://involve.org.uk/resources/knowledge-base/resources Involve Methods: https://involve.org.uk/resources/methods To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF and the England and Wales Chapter: Facilitation Stories website: https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/ And to email us: podcast@iaf-englandwales.org IAF England and Wales: https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales The Facilitation Stories Team: Helene Jewell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/ Nikki Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/ Transcript N.W Hello, and welcome to Facilitation Stories brought to you by the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Nikki Wilson (NW) and today I'm going to be talking to Suzannah Lansdell (SL) about public dialogue. So welcome, Suzannah. S.L Thanks, Nikki, lovely to be here. N.W Okay, so to start off with, could you tell us a little bit more about you and what you do. S.L So I'm a freelance facilitator, I've been doing that for about 15 years or so. I started, and so how I got into it just as a bit of context, as it sort of helps a bit with the public dialogue is, I started working for an environment charity back in the 90s. And I was doing a lot of work then with businesses, convincing them that there were commercial implications around environment sustainability issues. But one part of that the charity had was also about consensus building, about how do you get different organisations to approach environment sustainability issues, that at that time in the 90s, were very kind of adversarial in a more kind of consensus based approach. And absolutely core to that was facilitation, as a way to, to break through that more adversarial approach. So then I started working a lot on that and I kind of cut my teeth on some of the big issues of the day, things like nuclear waste, oil disposal, oil infrastructure disposal, biotechnology. So some really kind of big issues where people were on opposing sides and a facilitative approach helped people to kind of have more constructive conversations and find a way through. So that's kind of where I cut my teeth. And then moving on, what I'm much more doing now is that I advise and I support organisations on how they do public and stakeholder dialogue, and particularly around public dialogue work for an organisation called Science wise, that looks at public dialogue around science and technology. But I also do some kind of keeping my oar in on the practice in terms of facilitating citizens assemblies, and other kind of processes involved with the public. And then a little spattering of training in facilitation and a little bit of kind of charity away days, but most of my work at the moment is around the kind of public dialogue in science and technology. N.W Okay, great. And that was a very neat segue into today's topic, which is about public dialogue. So for listeners that aren't familiar with this term, what do we mean by public dialogue? S.L I suppose in its simplest terms, it's a process where you've got members of the public coming together with specialists and policymakers and other stakeholders to deliberate and have ...
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    27 mins
  • FS 66 Facilitate 2024: Growing Together with Paul Brand

    FS 66 Facilitate 2024: Growing Together with Paul Brand
    Apr 16 2024
    In this episode Helene talks to Paul Brand, Director of Risk Solutions and part of the IAF England and Wales Leadership Team, Board member and conference team member. They talk about The IAF England and Wales facilitators and friends Facilitate 2024 Conference (April 26th & 27th 2024) and what it is all about. Who is on the organising team and what Paul's role has been What is different from last year's conference What kinds of sessions we can expect What he is looking forward to A bit about the participants some of whom are coming from outsde the UK How the IAF England and Wales conferences have grown over the years and what makes them successful "it is a bit like a buffet and having taste of this and a taste of that.""what really makes me happy about the whole thing, and inspired by it, is watching people enter into it and throw themselves into it. Watching them having conversations with people they've never met and would never meet and, and go away taking whatever it is they've taken from the conference". A full transcript is below. Links Today’s guest was Dr Paul Brand https://www.linkedin.com/in/drpaulbrand/ paul.brand@risksol.co.uk https://risksol.co.uk/ Today’s subject The Facilitate 2024 Conference https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/facilitate2024-growingtogether-tickets-733547288687?aff=oddtdtcreator To find out more about the IAF and the England and Wales Chapter https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales The Facilitation Stories Team Helene Jewell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/ Nikki Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/ Transcript Hello and welcome to facilitation stories brought to you by the England and Wales chapter of the International association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Helene Jewell and today I'm talking to Paul Brand,a management consultant whose work focuses on public policy. He often works on long term engagements across entire sectors for multi organisation communities, and uses facilitation extensively in his work. He's also an IAF England Wales board member, certified professional facilitator and a member of the conference planning team. Welcome, Paul. Good morning. It is morning. It is morning. Good. It is morning. It is morning. So my first question is just to ask you, really to tell us a little bit more about you as a facilitator and your involvement in the IAF. So I came into facilitation like a lot of people, not quite realizing I was doing it, doing a lot of public policy consulting things, and needing somebody who would lead groups of people through discussions. And then that became a better understanding of what facilitation as a profession was all about. And that grew and grew over the years. I did a long piece of work in the about 2011 2012, working with a very senior IAF board member. We did a lot of events together, and during that time I understood what the IAF was about and realized I needed to actually make my facilitation skills part of my professional development formally. So I did the IAF certified professional facilitator thing in 2012, which was quite a developmental experience in itself, and I keep that up to this day. And then over the last four or five years, I've become more and more involved in the workings of IAF, in England and Wales particularly, and have also had the privilege of attending a couple of the european conferences in Paris and Milan, finding out how our colleagues across the channel do it. So it's been an arc of development. Yeah, an arc of development slowly, slowly coming further and further in. And obviously we're here today to talk about the about conference. So let's start off with the kind of, the basic stuff. So IAF England and Wales conference in April, I guess. What do we need to know? The dates, where it is, what is it all about? So it is Friday and Saturday, the 26th and 27 April. And for quite a few years now, we've done this Friday Saturday mix seems to balance that. Some of the people, depending on their work and professional lives, some of them can, you know, share those two days, rather than it being two days out mid week or two days at a weekend. It is in Birmingham it is at a venue called the Priory rooms, which is quite close to the middle of Birmingham. It's very easy to get to, and it's two full days, the Friday and the Saturday. It is quite broadly based. We had about 70 people last year. As of yesterday, we've got 100 people coming ...
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    25 mins
  • FS65 Chapter Chat with Bogdan Grigore IAF Romania

    FS65 Chapter Chat with Bogdan Grigore IAF Romania
    Mar 19 2024

    In epsode Bogdan tells us about himself as a facilitator and trainer, what it means to be a playful facilitator and his journey into facilitation.

    He tells Nikki and Helene about how IAF Romania and how it all began, from joining IAF in 2018 to getting intouch with other facilitatrors in Romania. With the start of the pandemic 2 years later and everyone had more time he found out what was needed to start a chapter, and started IAF Romania with Bogdan as the Chair.

    Since 2020 the chaoter has grown to 27 members, with more facilitators wanting to be a part of the community. The growth has happened in terms of quality of events as well as numbers.

    Facilitation is not well known in Romania and not well known in organisations.

    Bogdan talks about engaging new people to the world of facilitation, organising events and enabling people to make connections and talks in more detail about some of the events they have hosted for example Open Space in HR.

    They also have a group mentoring programme and how that works.

    They have two types of approaches - one for the community and one for the IAF Romania members. Most events are co-facilitated so there is a lot of learning.

    Some examples of the events are:

    Training about having impact in online facilitation - Nelson from Portugal.

    Pop up sharing around a particular topic.

    Facilitators Studio - where someone can bring a new design to try out.

    Facilitator Lab - helping two facilitators to create something together. An example of this is AI and facilitation.

    The core members of 10/12 come up with the ideas for all the events and build the ideas together.

    They plan to have their first in person event - a facilitation festival in the autumn.

    Bogdan talks about collaborations with other IAF Chapters and explains how these have worked:

    Twin Chapters with IAF Italy

    Facilitation Lightening Talks, some of which were with IAF Ireland and IAF Italy

    He talks extensively about the collaboration with IAF Japan and the 9 or 10 meetings that were needed to set this up and the cultural learning points.

    Helene asks Bogdan to talk about his role in IAF Europe and Middle East as part of the share and learn team and the benefits of bringing together different cultures and facilitation experience.

    Bogdan talks about what next for IAF Romania - elections, continued focus on mentoring, sending chapters from the Power of Facilitation book out in their newsletter which they have translated into Romanian.

    Bogdan lastly talks about his hope for the future and the facilitation festival.

    To contact Bogdan:

    https://www.linkedin.com/in/bogdangrigore82/

    IAF Romania:

    https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/romania

    https://www.linkedin.com/company/iaf-romania-international-association-of-facilitators-romanian-chapter/?originalSubdomain=ro

    The Power of Facilition:

    https://facpower.org/2021/06/01/what-is-the-power-of-facilitation-and-why-is-it-important/

    Lightening Talks:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcOrr9Sj17U

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tluzc03l4sM

    Celebrating Diversity with IAF Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FctxQou8F9w

    Find Helene on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/

    Find Nikki on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/

    Listen to our podcasts: https://www.facilitationstories.com/

    Email: podcast@iaf-englandwales.org
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    36 mins
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