Contact Bill to
Enquire about Facilitation Services
Facilitation --
Questions to Ask
You might also be
interested to know about...
Facilitation Skills
Development
Advanced Facilitation
Our Coaching Services
|
Our Facilitation
Services…
Our Approach
to Facilitation:
Bill Cropper, Director of The
Change Forum, is an accomplished facilitator with more than 20 years
practical experience helping groups at all levels from senior management
to shopfloor, grapple with diverse issues, problems and challenges
including strategic planning, visioning, workplace improvement, work
process redesign, organisation renewal, action-learning, team renewal,
community action, culture change, customer service and organisation
development in a broad range of business settings.
Bill has facilitated senior management teams grappling with strategic,
operational, financial, resource, environmental, HRM, structural, policy
and political-level issues or to address significant business, corporate,
market or sectoral problems and determine courses of
action/directions/strategies. He’s run various forums with peak
industry/union/government bodies to help formulate policy and evaluate
program options/alternatives at national, state and local levels and also
been involved in facilitating extensive rounds of stakeholder, customer
and community consultation using open-space technology to assist
decision-makers develop action implementation plans for a wide range of
public sector organisations
Bill has personal mastery of a wide range of facilitation processes, tools
and techniques, which are naturally employed in all consulting, training
and workshop presentation activity. He’s designed and delivered a large
array of Facilitation Skills clinics and trained thousands of executives,
line managers, change leaders, trainers, business process/work redesign
facilitators, project groups and work-teams, to develop the critical
facilitation skills needed to collectively achieve their outcomes.
Not
all Facilitators are the same... And different situations may call for a
different style or approach to facilitation. You might want to consider
what you are expecting from engaging a facilitator and think about some
questions to ask.
Features of
The Change Forum’s approach to Facilitation include:
|
Versatile and personalised:
There’s no one facilitation-size fits all. Our
wide-ranging facilitation experience in many different contexts
enables us to design facilitation processes and session-agendas to
suit your particular situation, challenges, outcomes as well as
the emotional complexion of your group. |
|
Structured Data Collection:
we record your group’s ideas, actions and
information in formats that are practical, simple, useful and can
be readily taken up and acted on after your session. We can also
provide a report-back to debrief your group after the event. |
|
Easy-to-understand: Sometimes facilitation processes can be
overly-complicated. We use a wide-range of track-tested tools and
techniques that are robust, simple but effective and can be
readily understood and used by your group. There’s no mystique or
complicated processes where groups get lost. Our motto is use the
simplest tool that will get the results you’re after. |
|
Change models and frameworks:
Most facilitation is about helping groups to
change, fix, improve or create something. Our extensive background
in organisational, team and personal change means we have at our
disposal an impressive array of models and frameworks your group
can apply to analyse, clarify and act on change. |
|
Perspective-Sharing:
facilitation is often about getting ideas out of
individual’s heads and onto the table where different perspectives
and ideas can be shared in a safe and criticism-free environment.
We use tools that help groups tap their knowledge, learn together,
arrive at mutual understanding and develop actions-ideas everyone
supports. |
|
Dealing with dynamics. All groups need to deal with the emotional,
interactional, conversational and personality/conflict issues that
get in the way of effective functioning – and with our extensive
background in Social and Emotional Team Intelligence we help
groups work through emotions, handle difficult moments, overcome
blocks to working together effectively and unleash higher
potential. |
|
Inclusive and engaging: Getting engagement is fundamental for effective
facilitation. Feedback we get often highlights our ability to get
people to speak-up. We take an inclusive approach that focuses on
the use of dialogue and consensus-building techniques to help
groups reach workable agreements that most can actively support
(no – we don’t believe consensus requires full agreement) |
|
Conversational Capacity-Building:
Too much undirected talk can get in the
way of making headway but poor conversations and destructive
debate/arguments can also impede progress. We bring to our
facilitation approach an extensive background in conversational
coaching that can help your group raise the constructive calibre
of their conversations through sharing air-time, questioning,
connecting and active listening. |
|
Relaxed and laid-back:
Often people can be tense/uptight facing
facilitated situations where they don’t know what to expect. Many
of our clients comment on our laid-back and relaxed style that
puts people at ease, respects their psychological safety and helps
encourage easier engagement and interaction. |
|
Action-orientation:
groups want to feel they’ve made progress and see
results by the end of a session. All our sessions end with
action-planning and event-tracking activities that ensure people
have agreed actions, priorities and accountabilities to help them
to work towards the results they’re after. |
|
What People
Say about Bill's Facilitation approach:
“While I was RD for Families in
Central Queensland Region, Bill Cropper successfully facilitated a
series of workshops for my managers and staff and subsequently
coached the RMT and LFS teams working on improvement projects in our
region. While Bill can be challenging at times, he is also sensitive
and supportive to the needs of individuals in the group. He also
showed his skills and abilities to engage and have dialogue with
indigenous people in a sensitive, non-threatening and supportive
manner – but not in a paternalistic way. I put this down to his
South Pacific experience working with indigenous peoples in Fiji”.
Ron Weatherall former Deputy
Director-General, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Services.
“I really enjoy your style of
facilitation Bill, as it is a well balanced mix of theory, practical
and humour in a relaxed atmosphere, which makes learning much easier
when it is fun! I gained more strategies, techniques and tools to
further raise my self-awareness and emotional intelligence”
Mickey Polkinghorne - Disability Services
Queensland
”Keep doing what you are doing
– I really liked your facilitation style and your manner of
facilitating the group. I learned a lot, not only from the content,
but also from your own style of presentation. I may even steal a
couple of little activities that you used to use in some of my own
facilitation.” Alison Rewald – Community
Corrections Mackay
“I just that I thought you did
a fantastic job. It was more beneficial than any other team building
day I have attended. It is not an easy thing to come into a group of
people, read the vibe and work through issues as they are raised..
It brought to the surface bottled up emotions and issues"
Terri Reynolds The Benevolent Society
"Excellent day structured in a
way that allowed the group to choose how it progressed which to me
is great approach. It was a pleasure to have such an insightful
genuine, person facilitating and I thank you for your great
facilitation and I look forward to another chance to enjoy your
knowledge." Charlotte, The Benevolent
Society
"I appreciated the humorous way
of looking at the way people work, and the way you called behaviour
what it was, and didn’t step around issues. I personally like the
straight-down-the-line, no-nonsense and matter-of-fact way you
facilitated the team dynamic. The dialogue session got things on the
table and was a freeing experience. I also think that you were
respectful to everyone and their views, and were respectful when you
needed to redirect team members or activities (for example,
reframing in the dialogue, pointing out that asking quiet people for
thoughts can hinder safety, etc). I appreciated your knowledge,
expertise, and experience, I think it was reflected in the work you
did. It is not easy to impress a room of psychologists and social
workers (psychs in particular seem to rip these kinds of things
apart), so well done to you! I also think that your personal style
helped to make me feel safe. Please keep up the sense of humour, I
think this really helped." Stacie Hobbs
Dept of Communities
"Thank you for the insightful
workshop you facilitated. I just wanted to express how blown away I
was from the whole experience. I have attended many "planning days"
in the past which involved some very light activities but this was a
very positively overwhelming experience. I was so impressed with
your quick and accurate analyses of people's responses. It was
extremely intellectually stimulating and I felt like I had spent the
day reading a book that I couldn't put down! Thanks again for the
unforgettable experience and I will be discussing your work with
many people for a long time to come."
Reina Veivers Department of Communities
"Bill has developed a
reputation in Australia for his creativity, innovation, energy and
commitment, patience and sense of humour in a range of complex and
sometimes difficult assignments. I rate his communication,
presentation, negotiation and facilitation skills highly. He relates
well at all levels of an organisation and develops and sustains
effective working relationships. He has very highly developed
analytical and conceptual skills, combined with the capacity to help
others understand ideas, notions and concepts. He is able to
spontaneously problem solve, think on his feet and also facilitates
others in resolving complex change management problems and issues.
Bill has played a lead role in management, cultural and work
practice reform in this country." Viv Read
former National President, AHRI & President of Australian Society
for Organisational Learning |
.
billc@thechangeforum.com OR
+61-(0)7-4068 7591 or Mob: +61-(0)429-687 513
Back to top
|