External Facilitator

If you're watching this video, you're considering engaging me as an external facilitator for your strategic planning retreat, your exco summit, your offsite meeting, your planning meeting, perhaps an ideation retreat. Thank you for considering me. Let me tell you a little about how I work. First of all, why use an external facilitator? If you look into Google, as many people do, and do a search, why use external facilitators, you'll find that the vast majority of the research supports the use of an external facilitator for several very good reasons. First of all, an external facilitator has no baggage. They have no barrier to push. They're completely impartial. They're unbiased. And they bring experience as a facilitator. And that's what it's all about. You're looking for a facilitator, someone who will move your team or your group from wherever they are now to where you want them to be. And that may not be anything concrete. It may be quite intangible, or it might be ideological, or it might just be ideas. But you need to move people, and the facilitator is the person that does that. So what I bring as a facilitator is process, not content. The content resides with your people. My task is to bring out the wisdom, the knowledge, the experience, and the awareness of your people to get to the result that you want. Not to inject my ideas, but to bring out your ideas. Now that doesn't mean that I don't ask challenging questions which are content-based or contextually based. I obviously will do that. But I don't inject my ideas with the purpose of having you agree with them. My ideas will sometimes be simply to raise a flag of Thought for you to think about another approach, which really, from my perspective, I'm doing for process purpose, not for content purpose. One of the things about the external facilitator is I can much more easily than probably any of your own people treat everyone absolutely equally, because I don't know the background. I don't know the internal politics. And I don't want to know. My task is to deal with the— 5, 10, 20, 25 people that are in the room all as equal because they all have something to contribute. My task is to find out what that is and draw it out. It's my job to deal with the people who are perhaps a little too loud. It's my job to deal with people who may take over. It's my job to deal with the people who may make inappropriate comments or go down inappropriate paths or paths that don't contextually match what the purpose of the day is. I work with you ideally before the retreat. And in that regard, I help you choose the right venue. The venue can absolutely make or break a retreat. There's some tricks that I've learned over the years that work really well, and I'll share those with you. During the presentation or during the facilitation, then I will be in touch with whoever is the person who is the decision maker, because I need to troubleshoot. And if there's an issue, I need to know the person that I need to go to, to run past them what my thoughts are about the necessity to troubleshoot and the process that I need to go through if I do need to troubleshoot. But at the end of the day, that's my job. I'm the troubleshooter, so you don't need to be. After the facilitation, I can work with you in whatever detail you need, maybe to present the results in a written form of some description or in a pictorial form, We work on that during the day and decide what to do after the facilitation. My role is to make sure during the day you get the result you need so that everyone is treated fairly, everyone is treated equally, equally, and we harness the wisdom, the knowledge, the experience, the awareness of everyone in the room to get the best possible result.

My style as a facilitator is that I'm absolutely flexible. You have to be flexible to be a great facilitator. So I'll be willing, ready, and able to run with things as they occur, but also I'll be ready to suggest things if I think they need to be suggested, if we need to change tack slightly. I won't be afraid to make suggestions, and I won't be offended if you say no. And I'm also entertaining. Now, I'm not there to put on a show.

I'm the facilitator. In many ways, I need to be invisible.

But I do set the tone for the day, and I build the energy in the room because that's really important. Low-energy days achieve very poor results. High-energy days also can be a little over the top. I'm not over the top, but I do find that happy medium whereby you'll get the results you want in the tone that you want, and people go away First of all, not saying, well, that was a waste of time, but with people saying, I really enjoyed that and we got a lot out of it.

So look, thanks again for considering me as your facilitator.

I hope that we can work together.