You've asked for the ability to design a course around your specific needs. We've heard you loud and clear. Now, we offer CHOICE^SM - content and course design specifically for you.

To make tailored courses easy, we have a three-step process that makes it easy to isolate and concentrate on the specific needs of private groups.

Typical variables in the design of your custom class:

• Learning objectives
• Class length
• Coverage of facilitation fundamentals
• Time spent in exercises
• Budget
• Number of participants
• Prior training and experience
• Special content for your organization

The following examples are all recent, within the past year or so.

• A new product discovery and innovation department wanted to improve their facilitation skills. They needed to improve the stimulation of new ideas with internal work groups based on input gathered from ethnographic studies. They aspired for enhanced skills, better structure, and standardized approaches to build consensus with internal review boards and development teams. Ultimately, they improved the decision-making power of their organization and improved their portfolio alignment process with refined active-listening skills, improved process, and consistent rhetoric.
   
• Ten person board of directors wanted to improve their group decision-making process. Instead of relying on outside help, they decided to take the entire BOD and provide training on active listening, clear speaking, and other skills associated with professional facilitation. In addition to immersing themselves with a better understanding about how and when to use simple, complicated, and complex approaches to prioritizing from a few issues to hundreds of competing ideas, they practiced by example and developed newly found respect for each other.
   
• A group of sixty scientists needed to improve its ability to lead expert peers through an improved process of "discovery" (asking questions), while remaining neutral about content. They were instructed on how to become "process policemen" and properly manage the context of meetings so that others could make highly valuable content contributions in appropriate context.
   
• Nine members from the IT department of an international law firm sought to learn the skills, tools, and tips of a highly proficient facilitation technique. The class was highly customized around their existing methodology and culture. Case studies were built around their systems, architecture, prevailing needs, and personalities of members on their Decision Review Board.
   
• A plenary type training session for nearly one hundred people was held for a group of professional data modelers. They sought to improve their general understanding about preparing and facilitating business communities and gather their logical requirements. They especially wanted to focus on softer, people skills how to manage difficult personality types and other potential conflict.
   
• A manufacturer wanted to develop facilitation skills for operations team leaders (union and non-union). They wanted to develop facilitation proficiency, understand basic group decision-making tools, and improve their ability to manage personality types, even hostile situations. They understood the value of neutrality and sought additional tips on how to remain neutral, especially under highly adverse situations.
   
• A group of fast-track individuals was selected by a PMO (Project Management Office). The company sought to amplify their facilitation skills to improve their success with their most important or highly critical projects. Students shared highly insightful critiques of each other’ performance (in a positive sense), since the group knew that the hopes and prosperity of the company’s future depended largely on their efforts to lead through facilitation.
   
• The Executive Management professors from a major university sought to improve their ability to listen and challenge the assumptions of executive students, without coming across as impertinent or insensitive. The knew they needed to practice their learnings and wanted to test a new process they designed to assist executive teams with portfolio management. The case study was filmed and photographed and converted to a promotional video and support for collaterals.
   

Some classes may include time facilitating the students around their issues of standards or application or other concerns. These training session Wrap-Ups include careful attention to issues that have been logged in the Parking Lot. Participants leave with new skills and the group leaves with clearer next steps -- what needs to be done differently to ensure that objectives are met or exceeded.