Facilitation is a highly skilled activity used in organisations to help people in events, workshops and meetings to collaborate, innovate and make decisions about a challenge or opportunity to achieve a shared goal.
Creative facilitation means using innovation tools and techniques in virtual or in-person events to help delegates work together to think differently, and collectively shape new solutions.
Creative facilitation is often more difficult than it looks, because a great facilitator makes it look easy! Working through an agile, response innovation process with multiple, diverse stakeholders with different priorities as well as thinking styles to achieve a target outcome needs skill and emotional intelligence.
That said, creative facilitation skills can be learned.
Our Creative Facilitation Skills Programme helps you to become the best creative facilitator that you can be. You will find and strengthen your authentic, signature facilitation style, learn how to design and lead awesome innovation sprints, team workshops and strategy events and build your creative facilitation competence and confidence.
Creative Facilitation Skills Programme – Online and In-Person Sessions Available
This comprehensive, speciality programme is designed to equip you, as a leader of innovation events, with the insight, self-awareness, skills and tools to significantly advance your innovation and group facilitation competence.
It can be specially commissioned to be run inhouse for between 8 and 25 people over 1 or 2 days, with a one-to-one creative facilitation coaching option available to complement your delegate experience.
Programme Outcomes
You will learn to:
- Optimise innovation workshop sessions and meetings through a range of new tools and techniques
- Design engaging, efficient and successful sessions and events that get results
- Deliver highly effective facilitation to groups
- Enhance your existing innovation skills and creativity
Your Programme Leader
The event will be designed and delivered by Dr. Jo North, Associate Lecturer for business creativity and innovation at the University of York as well as being the Managing Director of The Big Bang Partnership Limited.
Jo has leading-edge expertise in working with companies to optimise the creative potential of their people, products, services and brands and build an innovative, entrepreneurial capability into organisational culture.
She brings a truly unique perspective to teams and innovation as she combines her academic excellence, research and facilitation skills with real world, commercial business experience.
High-level Outline
You will be invited to complete a short online questionnaire on your previous experience (if any) of leading innovation sessions and workshops, and your goals and objectives for attending the programme.
The course will then be designed to meet your specific needs.
Key themes covered will include:
- Understanding innovation – from ideas to commercialisation
- Co-creation and the role of the innovation facilitator
- Key success factors in designing and facilitating co-creation events
- Achieving optimal contributions from co-creation delegates – both individually and in a group context
- Dealing with ‘challenging’ delegates and ‘sensitive’ topics
- Developing delegates’ own authentic ‘signature’ facilitation style
Each attendee will have the opportunity to put their learning into practice and do some hands-on facilitation in the afternoon session. An innovation facilitation guide and toolkit will also be provided for each participant to take away.
