Facilitation Stories

IAF England Wales
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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.

  1. 05/12/2025

    🎙️ FS79_Julia Slay & Ending Sessions Well

    In today's episode, Olivia is joined by Julia Slay, founder of Facilitation 101, to explore an often-overlooked part of facilitation: how we end sessions well. With 15+ years' experience across social policy, consultancy and learning design, Julia shares her journey into facilitation and what sparked her growing fascination with powerful endings. They talk about: Why endings matter,and common mistakes at the close of sessions — rushed checkouts, lack of closure, and clunky feedback moments. How to design meaningful endings, using buffer time, reflection, grounding and action planning. The power of circularity too. Extending the ending beyond the room, with follow-ups and reconnection sessions.Plus creative closing practices, from body-based grounding to sound and movement.     Quote highlights "A strong ending creates a feeling of completeness." "Reflection without action feels unfinished."     Links Today's guest: Julia Slay, Founder, Facilitation 101 https://www.facilitation101.co.uk/courses?tag=Intensive https://myfreelancelife.substack.com/?r=b48m9&utm_campaign=pub-share-checklist https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-slay-aa02b240/    Today's host: Olivia Bellas - Coach, Faciitator, Learning Experience Designer  https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliviabellas/ To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF England & Wales Chapter: 🎧 https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/ 📧 podcast@iaf-englandwales.org 🌐 https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales   Transcript Olivia Bellas Welcome to facilitation stories. How do facilitators end up in the profession? What methods and techniques can we learn together? And we discover it all in this community Podcast, brought to you by the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Olivia, and today I'm talking with Julia. S. Julia is the founder and director of Facilitation 1 0 1, which began in 2023 after a simple request for a two hour session, which turned into a three day intensive. This is the course that now distills everything she wishes she'd known when she first started facilitating previous to all of this. She held a range of different roles, across social policy and charities, meaning now 15 years of experience designing and leading workshops, strategy sessions, and learning programs. So everything from away days and team development to full strategy. Retreats and international events. And in my opinion, also I must follow on LinkedIn for her generous and human sharings on navigating the world of facilitation. Julia, it's great to have you. Welcome. Julia Slay Oh, lovely to be here. And that was a very kind, generous introduction as well. Wow. Yeah. Thank you. Olivia Bellas Well, welcome. Welcome. So really looking forward to chatting today, and I know that we have a focus area. Mm-hmm. Which we will get into. So that focus area is looking at endings in workshops and why they're valuable, how we can do them. But for that, I wanted to kick off with, something that makes you smile. So thinking about your world of facilitation at the moment, what's making you smile? Julia Slay Mm, well, lots of things. I often feel like I have somehow landed doing a job that doesn't really feel like work. And surely that's like the dream. Well, it is for me anyway, that it's, , each day mostly. There are some small exceptions that mostly I feel really. Energized, focused, joyful with the work. But something that does always make me smile is when I'm running the training side of the work, I do the facilitation training through facilitation 1 0 1, and I'm in a room with really brilliant facilitators who often come from quite a wide range of disciplines, and they bring in their experience and I get to see and learn from them. Which is, which is kind of the. For me, one of the secret joys of running training is that you are learning all the time as well. And there was a course I ran a couple of weeks ago and someone who comes from a kind of theater background and has done a lot of work with, um, theater of the Oppressed was running an activity with the group and I just. Had a smile all over my face. She did an incredible job. And I kind of walked away thinking, yeah, I mean, I got to learn something new today that I've never seen before, and I absolutely loved it. So that, that brings me a lot of joy in my work at the moment. Olivia Bellas Hmm. Yeah, so you get the opportunity to, to have multiple smiles because of all of those, different perspectives of facilitators you are encountering. And actually, I'm quite. Intrigued by that. So you had someone from a theater background. , What other kinds of facilitators are you encountering? Julia Slay Yeah, well it's, it's getting much more diverse. Mm-hmm. I would say a year ago I was primarily working with and training people who were freelance. So, uh, self-employed, , people who often had a combination of kind of coaching, consultant facilitator roles. They had what I would call capital F facilitation. So they were kind of identifying and marketing themselves as a facilitator and much more. Now, certainly in my orbit, I am meeting people who. Talk about themselves as using facilitation skills, but they are not necessarily,, freelance and they're they're often more kind of internal. I have had people recently coming on training from the navy, from big tech companies, from um, you know, kinda team leaders and senior managers who are thinking a lot about, , the way they run their team meetings and their away days. I'm really enjoying seeing people connect with the skill and, , making connections between the work they do and facilitation skills and being able to see how. Powerful it could be when they brought it into their orbit. And I've also, I guess, I mean I do, as you said at the beginning, I do a lot of LinkedIn posts. I spend quite, quite a lot of my time on there, and I have really enjoyed. Getting more international exposure through that. Um, and, and seeing and learning from people who are applying facilitation in very, very different contexts. Um, some brilliant facilitators in, uh, New Zealand, in North America. We had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about some facilitators in Mexico who you had connected with, and I'm very keen to get their names from you as well.  Quite a lot in South Africa and in India. So I'm really, I, I feel like. You know, I'm very exposed to a, not even Eurocentric, like British centric way of thinking about facilitation. And I think through LinkedIn I'm . Learning a lot more about different, , countries, different , cultures and how they approach facilitation as well. Olivia Bellas  But you made a really interesting distinction between facilitation as a skill and I think probably. There's also the facilitator as a, a job or a role as, as well. , So I think it's, it seems like people are noticing the value of those skills in particular a lot more, , which is really, really exciting. And. And so how, how did you get here? Very interested in that. Lots of different paths and journeys I know facilitators have had, , to get to where they are. . Can you say a bit about . Yours? Julia Slay Yeah. Well, I. It, it was, I think, I think I know very few people. In fact, I dunno if I know anyone who woke up one day and was like, I wanna be a facilitator. So I think like lots of people, I kind of came into it by accident and was using the skills before I really knew the word existed. But, , I came through two roots. I think one was, well, maybe three. One was I had done a lot of work in my. Twenties working in a kind of think tank and consultancy, running training and workshops. So a lot of those workshops I would never have used the term facilitation. We talked about kind of hosting round tables and running events, but really we were trying to make them much more participatory to bring in structure, to bring in, you know, interesting ideas about how to prompt thinking and dialogue. So there was the kind of training, and I did some train the trainer training at that point in my life. And then I did some coaching training and went quite deep into team coaching and quality improvement coaching. Um, and that to me, there's like a very fine line between group coaching and facilitation. You know, that's quite blurry . , So those were I guess, the two skill sets that felt very facilitation adjacent. And then, , when I left my last kind of quote unquote proper job, which was at the Greater London Authority, so the GLA kind of policy role there, I went freelance and was labeling myself as like a strategy research policy consultant. Actually what people started employing me for was facilitation. And uh, people started saying, can you facilitate this away day? Can you facilitate this strategy process? Can you facilitate this community of practice? And one day I remember changing the signature on my email and thinking, you know, I didn't even know this word existed two years ago, and now apparently I am one. So it was almost kind of. By by accident. I guess it was the main skill I was using as a consultant, and I do think a lot of people who are freelance consultants are using facilitation skills, whether or not they call themselves a facilitator, that is like a really core skillset for them. Olivia Bellas I think a really interesting point you made was that exactly, there's lots of people that are essentially doing this kind of thing already without necessarily knowing it and giving it a name. And actually you mentioned the GLA, which is where we actually met and we're working there. And similarly. Working in social policy, community engagement, doing this work around better conversations and kind of dynamics between groups, but not, not necessarily having a label. Julia Slay And, and I would say not necessarily havin

    34 min
  2. 🎙️ FS 78 – Relaunch Episode: Meet the New Hosts; Umah, Sam, Olivia

    21/11/2025

    🎙️ FS 78 – Relaunch Episode: Meet the New Hosts; Umah, Sam, Olivia

    In today's episode, the Facilitation Stories podcast returns with a brand-new hosting team — Olivia, Sam, and Umah — who share their stories, inspirations, and hopes for the next chapter of the podcast. They talk about: Why they joined the Facilitation Stories team and what excites them about podcasting as a way to connect facilitators and share learning. How their diverse backgrounds — from healthcare and construction to creative arts, community engagement and youth work — have shaped their facilitation practice. The power of collaboration and curiosity in creating spaces for reflection, learning, and human connection and what underpins their hopes for this podcast series And, of course, an important conversation about pets, TV guilty pleasures, and favourite biscuits! 🍪 "It's about creating space where people can make sense of their own stories — and find belonging in shared spaces." "Sometimes, facilitation is about slowing down, thinking, and making time for the conversations we don't usually have."     Links Today's guests are the hosts themselves: Olivia Bellas https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliviabellas/ Sam Moon https://www.linkedin.com/in/theboymoon123/ Umah Ganeshalingam https://www.linkedin.com/in/umah/ To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF England & Wales Chapter: 🎧 Facilitation Stories website: https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/ 📧 Email us: podcast@iaf-englandwales.org 🌐 IAF England & Wales: https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales     Transcript Helene Hello and welcome to Facilitation Stories, the community podcast of the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Helene Jewell and for the last time I am introducing the podcast because I'm going to be passing the baton onto this wonderful new team. We have Sam Moon, Olivia Bellas, and Umah Ganeshalingam. In this episode, you're going to hear Sam, Umah and Olivia talk about their hopes for the Facilitation Stories podcast, some of the work they all do, the kinds of things they're interested in hearing about, and the conversations they're hoping to have. And it just leaves me to say thanks to everybody that I've worked with on this podcast. Pilar Orti, who started the whole thing, Nikki Wilson, we worked together for ages and it has been absolutely fantastic working with both of them and to Rena Kosh as well, who does all the graphics and stuff that go out alongside the podcast and pretty much everybody else that's been listening, all the guests we've had over the last few years, it's been fantastic. Umah Thank you, Helen, and thank you to you and the team for everything that you've done today and handing it over so nicely to us. Helene Good luck to you all. Sam We'll be standing on the shoulders of giants. Thank you Helen. So I'll kick off with the question. What brings you here, Olivia, to the new crew,  why was it important for you to be here? Olivia Podcasting as a format really works for me, so it's definitely a medium that I enjoy for work, for fun. The idea of being part of a crew, a team, building a podcast is really, really exciting to be a bit more behind the scenes. I remember I was at the IAF conference in April in Birmingham earlier this year and seeing this call out to see who's interested. And that was one reason. And then the other reason was actually I tend to collaborate a lot. This year, I haven't been really up until that point and was like, oh, what's missing? And it was that feeling that I was actually, as a facilitator, doing lots of solo work, which I think has value sometimes, but I was really missing more closer collaboration with others. Yeah. What about you, Sam? Sam I think it's curiosity, which is often very much my kind of North Star towards things and serendipity and an interest in being with others, exploring and discussing what I enjoy and the room and the space to do that with others, and also an excitement and interest in talking about, talking with and sharing conversation with other people who are in the facilitation world. And I think just the opportunity to play with those ideas and experience other people's experiences. Learn a little bit about this realm of podcasting, which I'm not massively familiar with myself. I'm here with openness to the curiosity of what is possible. Really. So Umah,  come to you. What brings you here, and why was it important for you to be involved in the IAF podcast as a as a new crew member? Umah Mine all started with a conversation with Paul, where I had joined as a IAF member and as part of the intro, he spoke to me about the IAF, the podcast and said, oh, if I'm keen, I could be involved in it. And almost the day I joined as a member, I say, yeah, I'll happily get involved with the podcast too. And then it was about finding other people to do it with us, and he mentioned it at the conference, which unfortunately I couldn't attend, but I'm hoping to attend this one. Coming up, in terms of my why at work, it's quite delivery. Whereas this for me is a place where I could slow down a bit, have the space and time to have conversations, think about why we're doing things. Is our approach the right approach? How do other people do things and do a bit more of that philosophizing really, that we don't always get to do? But the thing is, by exploring this with both of you, with our guests in the future, and also the audience who's listening in, it's just really good to get different viewpoints and build that community. I think that's quite key for me. Olivia I think it's really interesting around sometimes we well, we often get caught up in the doing and the delivery side of things, and it is about looking at what is it we do. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But yeah. What's my follow up question. Is there a kind of area of facilitation that you're particularly interested in, or is it more about sort of your discovering, you know, through your practice. Umah I've had quite a few different career changes. So I started off as a clinician and I was seeing pediatrics and adults with hearing and balance difficulties. And how you communicate is key in terms of the impact on their the diagnosis, the management of it. And it's how can we make them feel comfortable, give them that space to explore and ask the questions. So it's facilitating them through this process, right. So I initially started with patient experience journeys that kind of facilitation. How can we make the process better. And then afterwards I had a career change, went into construction and it became more about customer experience or passenger experience when I did airports. It's interesting that you asked me that, Olivia. So before it was the journey, whereas now it's the community, the group. What's the common? People have different needs and different things to attain. At the moment, lots of people are off in different directions. What is the commonality? It's changed that way for me. How about for you? What's your area of practice right now? Olivia And that's a good point right now adding that bit. I think it does change quite a lot. I've also dipped my toe into quite a few different working worlds. I've come from creative sector, arts culture, worked with artists a lot, and I've brought that into government spaces, charity spaces, public dialogue and also thinking about making teamwork more enjoyable, easier. But I bring a lot of play. So a lot of that kind of creativity, which is naturally how my brain works. But how do we use that as a way into the workplace? I mean, there's a lot of science and evidence that backs up that using playful approaches Really helps us in terms of fresh thinking. So I'd say at the moment I do use a lot of serious play in my work. I do use a lot of other kind of practices like walk and talks, visualization. So that side of things is where I'm focused right now. Umah Yeah. Sam, we've spoken a lot about, for example, our why. What is it that you're hoping that us together on the podcast is going to do? Sam That's a good question. My kind of world of work has been twenty five years or so in youth and community, sort of focused. So a lot of my facilitation is kind of through that, through that lens. And I'm earning the last year or so have gone full time freelance by myself. So I've been on a journey of figuring out what it is that I do in that new world. So I'm very much on that story of kind of discovery, but finding myself working a lot in the sort of community Subcommittee film co-production, lived experience, but also being drawn and developing work around kind of impact through means called ripple effect mapping. I'm very much pulled into different things and then began to get get interested in what makes me smile and what creates the energy. So I'm still very much in this discovery stage, but it's also interesting as a kind of work through things is having to remember to be me and follow the things that I like to do and create and facilitate in the way that I wish to facilitate and follow my own path. It's very easy to kind of be looking at all the amazing things that other people are doing and going, oh, that looks great, I should be doing that. And you forget to actually do the things that you do well. Focus on those on those things. And when I remember that and lean back into the things that are me and that I do, the world opens up and I find myself in spaces doing really exciting things and creative pieces of work, which then lead into to other things like this in terms of the opportunities the podcast brings and what we'd like to explore. I'm really interested in speaking to a whole range of different types of facilitation, and really looking at ways in which people can talk about what they're passionate about and what's important to them. But I'm also interested, because of my own passions in

    28 min

  3. 20/05/2025

    FS 77 Facilitation in the Agile Space with Farah Egby and Çiğdem Saka Jackson

    In today's episode Helene speaks to Farah Egby and Cigdem Saka-Jackson about Agile.   They talk about: Agile as a set of working practices that prioritises people over processes and tools; Farah and Cigdem's previous work and journeys into Agile facilitation; The roles and functions that the "Scrum Master" and "Kanban" play in Agile; Roles and techniques in Agile facilitation and tips on how to do it; "I think you need to care. You have to be a caring person. I definitely don't believe it is, it is a rule book and just a set of applicable guidelines. You have to care about the people you work with and the team you're working with". How Agile can be applied in different contexts including personally. "There are things that you can also apply to your own life individually, you can stop and have a moment to reflect, even if you don't do it with a formal process". Links Today's guests:  Farah Egby:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/farah-egby/  farah@tuntara.co.uk Cigdem Saka-Jackson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%C3%A7i%C4%9Fdem-saka-jackson-7885a111/ cigdemsaka@gmail.com 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/

    42 min

  4. 25/03/2025

    FS 76 Chapter Chat with Andrew Spiteri EME Regional Director

    In this episode Helene talks to Andrew Spiteri, Regional Director of the IAF Europe and Middle East Region. Andrew tells Helene about himself as a facilitator, the kind of work he does and his background with IAF. He became regional director at the start of the year and shares a bit about the work he has been involved in so far, his roles and responsibilities as director, and what he would like to see in future for the region and beyond. He tells us about the regional conference in Romania in November 2025 and about what he most loves about facilitation. You can contact Andrew at: rep.europe@iaf-world.org And Helene at helene@jewellfacilitation.com To contact the podcast team: podcast@iaf-englandwales.org Transcript   H.J Hello and welcome to Facilitation Stories, the community podcasts brought to you by the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. I'm Helene Jewell, and this episode is one of our quarterly chapter chats, where we talk to people leading other chapters in the IAF global community. We ask them how they see the status of facilitation where they are, and the history priorities, current projects and aspirations for their chapter. My guest today is Andrew Spiteri, IAF endorsed facilitator, consultant and elected Regional Director for the Europe and Middle East, EME region of the IAF for 2025-26. Andrew accompanies diverse groups, associations, entities, NGOs and also faith based organizations, and also often works in international settings, helping groups in collaboratively formulating vision, strategy and action planning activities. Andrew comes from Malta, is a resident in Brussels, and is in Italy for long stretches during the year. Welcome Andrew.   A.S Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.    H.J Every time I speak to you, you're globe trotting somewhere.   A.S That's right. Yeah, that's right.    H.J So tell us a little bit about you as a facilitator, and the kind of work that you do?   A.S That's, it's always difficult because to start, because it's, it's so fascinating facilitation. And I think I was doing facilitation for many years without actually knowing it was facilitation. So I love to help groups work together, and what I really love is to give space to each and every person, because to manage to help that everyone contributes. Because I really believe everyone, even those who are apparently not well prepared, well suited or appear to be like a lot of the time. But I think everyone has a gift to gift and facing that challenge of helping take away all what, what blocks this, this, this participation, and creating climate where people can collaborate is really something I love, and so that's what I try to do in my facilitation. I work a lot with groups, associations, sometimes even with companies, but I would prefer normally NGOs or even associations, which could be very small or very big, international, with all the challenges of culture differences and cultural differences and even age differences. So, yeah, that's a bit what I'd like to do, and what I do usually.   H.J Brilliant. And I think that thing about doing facilitation, before you know, it's called facilitation, is definitely a common theme, certainly, I think, back on all the podcasts we've recorded, and I think that's one thing that comes out in nearly all of them, fascinating. Okay, and so very international. What language do you facilitate in? Mostly, is it English?    A.S   Yeah, basically it's English. Not only, I know English, Italian, Maltese, evidently. So sometimes I do it in Italian. It depends on the group. I've just come from, Vienna. I had five sessions, very intense, and basically they were all in English. I had simultaneous translation in German. Most Viennese understand very well, and even speak English quite well. So it depends on the context, on the place, on the client, let's say, on how you organize. Yeah.    H.J   Wow. Sounds like you have a very diverse practice, which must be completely fascinating.   A.S   I remember once I was, like, two years ago, I was in Poland, and so this organization, sort of, they were, they knew a lot of Italian more than English. So I had two headphones, sort of from one headphone I would speak, a headphone with a microphone, and I would speak in English, sorry, in Italian. And they would they would hear me and translate in Polish. And from the other headphone, I would hear what the other people were saying in Polish translated into Italian. So it was like good, yeah.   H.J  Wow, that's the ultimate in a simultaneous translation. Blimey. Okay, so I should add multi-talented linguist to your list of skills, by the sounds of things. So I'd like to know a bit more about you know IAF and I know you've been involved for quite a while, so when did you become a member of IAF?    A.S   So that, yeah, yeah, it will go back to what you were saying before that for many years, or for many for some time, most of us actually don't know we're doing facilitation. Probably it's because facilitation is so new and even so not known so much. So I found myself in Italy for a long time helping organize big events, but not just the logistical part, but especially the content part, not the content in the sense of Creating Content content, but in helping like the group using their content to work together. And I was continually searching for, I was sure there was some sort of thing, some organization, some shared knowledge on this. And then when, finally, in 2018 I moved to Brussels, I got to know about the IAF Belgian chapter, and I was really excited. They have, they have, and it's still ongoing, a monthly meetup in Belgium. And it's, uh, being so particular in Belgium because, especially Brussels, because it's a real international city, because of all the institutions, NATO and the EU and 10s of 1000s of people who basically speak English as a common language. So the IAF chapter does all its things in English. And I started frequenting that. And I remember I never missed a meeting. It was like so important. And then in 2019 there was the Milan Conference. And so it was set then from then onwards, I nearly immediately became a member and and prompted onwards. It's history. It's sort of, it went on now.   H.J   Once you start finding out about all these things that go on within IAF and the wider community, you sort of slowly become more and more involved. Nice. And I realize, although I'm going to ask you in a bit about your role as regional director, I'm not actually sure, are you part of a particular chapter, given that you sort of, you're a little bit of a nomad. You move around quite a lot.    A.S   Yeah, actually, I still am part of the Belgian chapter. Actually, I got elected together with others on the IAF the Belgium board, so I'm a member in absentia, because, I mean, I know they meet regularly. I don't have lots of time, but I do give them all the support needed, like all the others, actually, but I have a soft spot for Belgium, I must confess, evidently, yeah, so, so that's, that's what I do.   H.J  Great. So officially, part of IAF Belgium. And what kinds of things have you been involved with? So obviously, you've been going, you know, you started going to the meetups in Belgium, and it sounds like you went to the Milan Conference. What else have you been involved in, either as a participant or part of organizing?    A.S  So, so yeah, these official meetings. I mean, the Belgian reality is quite interesting, because the meetups are like, there are two or three different types. Like the basic is where there is someone who specialized in some methodology or something he's been doing, or she's been doing for many years, and they hold a session where they share all their knowledge. And another type of session would be where there's someone who's learning, maybe a new method, and would create a safe space, where they use us as guinea pigs, sort of and, and then at the end there's also, there's always a debrief.  And then the in both of these, it's so interesting, because you get to widen your knowledge of how to help groups with facilitation, yeah. Another point I forgot to mention, in my activities, I am finding myself staying quiet for long stretches in Italy, because most, some, most of my clients, are in Italy, actually. And the Italian chapter, I'm very much in contact with them. I know them, most of them, personally. They've just had this Friday and Saturday, their annual conference. It was a real big success. I had a work in Vienna, so I couldn't go there. But last year I went. It's always a really interesting event. So they don't hold monthly meetings. But for example, I got to know there is a group in Padova, in Padua, which meets every two months. They call it Facilitator Playground for one morning, and they do many the same as we do in Belgium. So every time I can, I go up and stay with them and support them, participate. So yeah, it's giving this back up is really essential. Because in these meetings, you find big community building between facilitators. You find a pool of learning with shared knowledge between facilitators and you and encourage each other, you get to know, maybe you get to know, people with whom you could actually work later on. But on the whole, you become friends with others, and I think that's a real big it's something. It's not nothing. It's a when we help each other, and you get to know differences, which can become a gift, because you widen your your personality, your knowledge, your approach to things, yeah.   H.J   Yeah I really love that about the IAF and just the sort of wider community as well, hanging out with other people that really love to talk about facilitation and, and all its kind of broad, you know, broad aspects, different aspects of it, and, and, yeah, you're right. You sort o

    39 min

  5. 18/02/2025

    FS 75 Race Ahead for Facilitators with Bianca Jones, Cat Duncan-Rees and Paul Brand

    In this episode Helene talks to Bianca Jones - Award Winning Mental Health & Anti-Racism Training Provider, MHFA England Associate and Founder & Managing Director of EDP Training, Paul Brand- Facilitator and Management Consultant, Director at Risk Solutions and IAF England and Wales board member and Cat Duncan-Rees-  Facilitator and founder of Curators of Change and also an IAF England and Wales board member.  She starts by asking Bianca to talk a bit about the work she does and what led her to develop EDP and the Race Ahead training She asks Cat and Paul about what led the IAF England and Wales Leadership Team to ask Bianca to deliver this training course online in October and about their key takeaways. Cat and Paul talk about the RA4F special thread at the IAF England and Wales conference Facilitate 2025 this year and where the idea came from?   Bianca shares some examples of specific impact or changes she's seen in a facilitator's approach after attending Race Ahead Bianca gives some more details her session at the conference and the training course she is offering the day before. All the guests then talk about why a focus around racial equality at the conference is important and why active race awareness matters in facilitation and what anti-racism might look like for facilitators. The guests also talk about their hopes for longer term initiatives in teh facilitation communicty around anti-racism. To book onto the RA4F course on 24th April 2025:  To book onto the Facilitate 2025 conference   To contact Bianca - bianca@edptraining.co.uk To contact Cat - cat@curatorsofchange.com To contact Paul - paul.brand@risksol.co.uk To contact Helene: Helene@jewellfacilitation.com    To contact the conference team: conference@iaf-englandwales.org Transcript H.J 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 we're going to be talking to Bianca Jones, Cat Duncan-Rees and Paul Brand. Bianca is an award winning mental health and anti racism training provider, MHFA England associate and founder and managing director of EDP training. Paul is a facilitator and management consultant, Director at Risk Solutions and IAF England and Wales board member and Cat is also a facilitator, founder of curators of change, and also an IAF England and Wales board member. Welcome everybody. So nice to see you all. Okay, so we've got a little bit of introductory stuff out of the way. I am going to dive in with my questions, and my first one is to you, Bianca, tell us all. Tell us about the work that you do.   B.J Oh, thank you so much. So I am Bianca Jones. I run a company based in Bristol called EDP training, which stands for Empower developed people, although we deliver training all over. We are eight years old, and we started by delivering Mental Health First Aid training. I retrained with Mental Health First Aid England, and through my work, I saw that there was massive inequalities in the workplace with black and brown people or racially minoritized individuals is the language that I will use, and I wanted to do something about it. So I started pulling together the race ahead suite of courses all around race, equity and allyship, to help people really understand what they're being an ally to. And that's been since 2020. We've been delivering our race ahead suite of anti racism and allyship courses .   H.J Great, and what kind of people come to these race ahead training courses?   B.J So first of all, anybody can sign up, because we have digital options as well, and anybody who's interested in kind of racial inequality. But we started focusing at corporate organisations, so mainly businesses, but I work with so many different types of organisations, small organisations to really, really large you know, with over 500 people, we work with charities as well, nonprofits, and we have lots of different options for if it's just an individual that wants to do some training, they can access our digital self-led options. And then we also have a train the trainer, because other trainers wanted to be able to train in this course and be able to deliver it as well. So we started that in 2022 in September, I believe. So we've currently got 15 other instructors out there that are delivering the race ahead suite of courses as well, but we tried to have lots of different options to make it accessible for anyone that wants to learn about this very important and vital subject.    H.J Wow. So it's not just you. In fact, there's quite a large group of you then.   B.J Absolutely taking over, spreading the message with the mission of race equity and allyship.    H.J Fantastic. Okay, and I've met you before, along with some of the IAF leadership team, because you delivered your race ahead training course to us, didn't you? And so I'm going to turn to Kat and Paul now to just remind us, or remind me, and let everybody else know how this came about. How did the IAF leadership team come to engage Bianca and be participants in her training course?   P.B We started having a conversation about a number of things to do with racial discrimination and minoritization out of the back of our two most recent conferences. And we were looking at a whole range of stuff about, you know, how racially balanced was our actual community? How comfortable were people from different backgrounds in that community? And we had some conversations, you know, because not everybody was entirely comfortable. And people had some experiences they thought, well, that could have been a lot better. And really, we started to think about whether we should have some kind of initiative across our community of IAF England and Wales and friends, that we could invite people to join, to do some self work in this area. Think about how it affects our work as facilitators. And we thought that the first step we should take was as a leadership team, or at least parts of the leadership team actually engaged with that ourselves, and we had a contact who knew Bianca. And so about eight of us had two or half day online sessions with you, and started to think about that as the kernel of something we might spread more widely, and I think we'll talk about later in the podcast. So yeah, but very much the sense of, well, we had to start with us before we start thinking of leading something with other people.   H.J And Cat I know you were involved in a lot of the conversations that led up to this, and for you, I think it was something that was very important that we did. Wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that and how we got to where we got to?   C.D Yeah, absolutely, really important Helen. I think for me, just picking up on what Paul sort of said around the conference, I think this first really started to come to light post COVID I think it's important to say when we started to bring people together. So there's a heightened awareness anyway, coming out of that post COVID period, and the world is looking and feeling very, very different. And, you know, we did a hybrid conference in Birmingham few years ago, we went on to do another two in Birmingham. We've got conference coming up this year, but over the previous three conferences, there's been a steady kind of build up of us trying to diversify that community, invite people in to do some very different sessions to really push the boundaries in terms of what we mean by inclusion for the facilitator community. I think, as well, and maybe this is a whole other podcast in itself, that idea of neutrality and how can we as facilitators really genuinely stand for, stand alongside those who are from minoritized communities, Race being one of those minoritized communities.    So some of the feedback from conference has been quite hard to digest. We know we haven't always got it right, but as Paul said, what we really want to do is start with ourselves as a leadership team and a board in order to be able to have the knowledge and the insights that we need to confidently be able to get alongside people who are coming into our spaces. I say our spaces, actually we want it to be, you know, their space, and for them to be really much a part of it. And how can we also challenge back in the broader facilitated community, because there is a huge lack of awareness. And I think that's something that's taken me a little bit by surprise, my own lack of awareness in that, not just the lack of awareness of other people, but as I'm growing in confidence and awareness of why this is so important, it's helping me to have the confidence to be able to challenge others. And I think that's where we're at now in terms of conference, and not just conference, actually, Paul will talk a little bit more about that. It's, you know, what we're committed to as a community over the next 12 months and beyond, in terms of really pushing that and diversifying things even further, and helping people to understand why this is so important, whatever spaces they're in.    H.J And before we jump into talking a bit more about conference, actually, I just wanted to quickly ask both of you about your key takeaways from the training, because I know if I go back and think about part of the training there was a bit of an action plan at the end, and I go back and I think about all that. I think wow, there was a lot in there and for me personally, I learned so much. But I just wondered if I could ask each of you, maybe Cat first and then Paul, for a couple of your key takeaways from Bianca's training?   C.D Yeah, I think my key takeaway was, one of them was, you know, really that commitment and willingness. In terms of a training session, you know, the people who came to those online sessions in themselves, or quite a diverse group of people in terms of gender, race, age, was notable as

    44 min

  6. 21/01/2025

    FS74 Representation and Lego with Camilla Gordon

    In this episode Nikki talks to Camilla Gordon, a  process facilitator , about representation in Lego and her new "Figiverse" project. They talk about  How Camilla uses Lego Serious Play in facilitation The lack of representation within Lego  'I had people of colour seeing these more representative Lego pieces and had really emotional reactions to it, because people have never seen themselves in these pieces' 'It has become so normalised that particular identities don't get represented in different spaces' Improving representation and access to more diverse Lego pieces 'recognizing that these forms of representation shouldn't be separated from the more traditional Lego pieces, but actually should be a core part of those packs' Camilla's new "Figiverse" project including how it started and future plans A full transcript is below.   Links: Today's guest: www.Camillagordon.co.uk www.Figiverse.co.uk 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, the community podcast of the England and Wales Chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name's Nikki Wilson, and today I'm going to be speaking to Camilla Gordon. So welcome, Camilla. To get us started would you like to tell us a little bit more about you and what you do.    C.G Sure. So I am a freelance facilitator, and I'm a process facilitator. So focused on getting groups from A to B, I am what I would call sector agnostic. So work across a range of different sectors with lots of different clients and groups from unaccompanied children, refugees and asylum seekers all the way through to corporate boards, and part of my approach in doing that work is trying to facilitate processes that are more inclusive, kind of recognizing power dynamics and hierarchies and rooms. I'm really clear that I'm not a D&I facilitator. For me, that's just the core part of how I work, rather than it being a kind of defined piece. And so, yeah, I do lots of kinds of work, lots of different places, lots of different processes.   N.W  Great. And so the focus of today's conversation is Lego. So how and why do you use Lego in your work?    C.G So I'm a Lego Serious Play facilitator, or what I usually like to say, I'm trained in Lego Serious Play. I say that because I use elements of Lego Serious Play in my work. But I'm not wedded to it in a strict way, in relationship to the process and how it works. I like to take bits and pieces of different methods and tools to make it work for the group, and so use Lego in a range of different ways within the different processes that I run from using Lego Serious Play in its most formal sense, but also using Lego as a tool to explore different parts of conversations and in different ways.   N.W  And so while you like to use some Lego, I believe you noticed there was something that you didn't like about it. So could you tell us a little bit more about that?   C.G  Yeah, definitely. I started using Lego Serious Play about seven years ago, and one of the first things I noticed was the lack of representation within Lego. I saw lots of yellow faces, I saw lots of yellow hands, but I didn't see any representation of black and brown heads and hands. I didn't see any representation of disabled people. I didn't see representation in many ways, in the Lego that I was using.    Following on from that, I spent a lot of time looking for some of those pieces, looking for ways to bring representation into my kit, because the groups that I work with were because the groups that I work with are from a huge range of different backgrounds with a huge range of different identities. And on that journey, I realised part of the reason I didn't have that in my kit to begin with was because very little of it existed in the world. I ended up on Lego resale websites, talking to Lego dealers, and while there were a few representations of black and brown heads, a lot of them were double printed with happy and angry on either side. And I was very aware of the stereotypes and tropes that come along with racial stereotypes, and I didn't want to feature that in my kit. And in the end, I had to get them custom printed, so I bought a whole load of heads with the formal colour being reddish brown or medium Nougat, which is the term the colour definition from LEGO. I had to get them custom printed.    And obviously, recognizing representation isn't just about racial representation. I also spent a lot of time looking for other identities that could be represented. And looked at things like wheelchairs. They were also very hard to source and had only been released in one kit. And they were five pounds each for the ones that I could source and they were very hard to find. Looking for other forms of representation, things such as hijabs, different elements of different religions, different elements of different identities, they were virtually impossible to find. And so it became a bit of a mission for me to try and find more pieces like that. And I came across a statistic. These numbers are not the actual numbers but it was something along the lines of 8 to 10 times the number of yellow and white heads represented to the number of black and brown heads represented. So there was a huge disparity in relation to those pieces.    Part of the reason doing this was so important to me was there is a perception that yellow is a neutral colour and that yellow represents everyone. When I get asked this question, I usually respond by asking, there is an American cartoon, The Simpsons, and they are all yellow. What ethnicity would you say the Simpsons were? Usually I get a very clear answer back, if I don't, then I ask which of the characters in The Simpsons aren't yellow? And then we find characters like the shopkeeper Apu. And then it becomes even more clear that actually that isn't a neutral colour. And time after time after time in my workshops, I had people of colour seeing these more representative Lego pieces and at times, I've had, you know, really emotional reaction to it, because people have never seen themselves in these pieces. I've had young people in wheelchairs who have never seen themselves in these pieces, and I regularly hear things along the lines of, it's me, I've never seen this before, through to young people who have taken away models of themselves and keep them on their on their shelf, because they want to keep that in sight for them, because they have never seen it. And part of the reaction when I talk to people is less about seeing themselves, but the realization that they have never seen themselves because it has become so normalised that particular identities don't get represented in different spaces.    N.W  Okay and so, I mean, obviously you were already taking some action within your own kit, but then you've now decided to actually take this forward and do something wider and bigger. How did you decide to do that and to do something more with the work that you'd already done?    C.G Well, this has been something that's been set on my mind for two years, but I was really keen that other people should have access to these sort of pieces, from the perspective of particularly Lego Serious Play facilitators, to broaden the representation within their kits. But beyond that, I use Lego mini figure pieces at the start of almost all my workshops, whether or not I'm using Lego Serious Play in order for people to be able to build representations of themselves. What has come out of that is the number of people requesting those pieces and asking where I got them from, because they want access to them. And so over a period of time, it became really clear that people did want these pieces. And so I decided that it was important for these pieces to be on offer, not just for Lego Serious Play facilitators, but for facilitators in general, and if and when individuals want them, for families, for people who are not facilitators, and for youth groups who work with a range of identities in their spaces. And it was hearing from individuals again and again that they wanted access to these pieces that was this sort of catalyst for me moving forward with this and trying to make it happen.   N.W And so how did you decide how you'd approach taking it wider, as it were? I mean, so you said that before you get custom printed figures in the designs that you want, how did you decide to kind of approach taking it wider?   C.G Well, something that has changed over the last few years is Lego has improved the range of pieces that they offer. While they don't always feature in their kits, you can order them directly.    N.W Right.   C.G And so in me being able to access more pieces, it meant there was an opportunity to pull a range of pieces together to make, to make a product, to make something that would be beneficial to groups of people recognizing that these forms of representation shouldn't be separated from the more traditional Lego pieces, but actually should be a core part of those packs. As I say, I don't think we should be adding things on, they should just be the norm. Yeah, and so that was part of how I went about it. I did a lot of research around what pieces were available, and a number of pieces are actually no longer available. I had a number, I have a number of heads, black heads that feature Vitiligo. I can no longer find those on the Lego website. I also came across a piece with a cochlear implant on the hair, I

    22 min

  7. 19/11/2024

    FS73 Reflections on being Chair of IAF England and Wales with Jane Clift

    In this episode Helene talks to Jane Clift about her role as the Chair of IAF England and Wales. They talk about: How Jane got involved with the IAF and the facilitation community "the game changer for me was coming to my first IAF conference,I had never met so many people interested in facilitation" How Jane became the Chair of IAF England and Wales Highlights and challenges since becoming the Chair  The importance of the IAF and community events "I think there's been a recognition in our chapter, in our community, we can all learn from each other."  And future plans for both the IAF England and Wales chapter and Jane A full transcript is below. Links Today's guest: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-clift/ Email: chair@iaf-englandwales.org  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 H.J 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 Helen Jewell, and today I'm going to be talking to Jane Clift, consultant, coach and facilitator and Chair of IAF England and Wales. Welcome Jane.   J.C Thank you very much, Helen. I'm very happy to be here.   H.J So I've got lots of questions for you, mostly about your role as chair, but before we do that, it'd be really nice to hear a little bit more about you as a facilitator and the type of work that you do.   J.C Very good opening question there. So I have facilitated in quite a wide range of contexts, and I think I was doing it before I knew it was called facilitation. So I'm currently have my own business, but I've also worked a great deal for organisations, originally in sort of technology and consulting roles. So I think I was setting up and running workshops well before I knew that there was a term called facilitator, or that facilitation was a thing. So I would say that my practice started very, very organically, very organically. It's   H.J It's funny, if I listen back to all the different podcasts we've done, we've done, I would say that that kind of thing is a real thread through all of them that people have kind of come into facilitation accidentally, organically, or discovered that it is called facilitation after they began doing it in the first place.    J.C Exactly, yeah, something that I've also, I've always really loved stationery and stationery shops, like I really, really enjoy going into rymans and places like that. So obviously, when you're working as a facilitator, you have got the best reason in the world to be stocking up on colourful stationery craft materials. So there's something about that aspect of it that I don't know,  just I've always really, really liked that idea of bringing, like, colourful stationery or objects into the workplace and having a reason to use them. And that reason is facilitation.    H.J I love it. That's a great reason. I am also a self confessed stationery nerd, so I totally, I'm totally on board with that. Is there a particular type of facilitation that you enjoy doing, or that you feel is your kind of forte? J.C So I've done a lot of facilitation around agreeing, like a strategy or a road map, or like, identifying things that are getting in the way. So one of the areas that I've actually facilitated on quite a lot is risk management, which is really an important topic if you're doing large scale programs or projects, which I've done quite a lot of in my career. So I actually really like that as a topic, whether you do that in person or online. I have done quite a lot of those workshops where you end up with a room covered in pieces of paper, covered in sticky, you know, in post its and so forth. But during lockdown, like many people, I became very adept at online facilitation, and that's probably the space that I've worked in the most over the last few years, and I, I really, really like that, and I'm amazed that it works, because you're connecting up people that can be all over the world, and you're just in this virtual space, and yet you can, you can make magic happen if you can facilitate it well, and I find that an incredible and unexpected gift that came out of lockdown. Having said that, there is nothing like the energy of being in a room with people. I also absolutely love that I had the great pleasure of being facilitated myself recently, large scale workshop, 30 of us in a room, all talking about something, and it was just so much fun. So I'm not sure I've really got a niche. I'm quite a versatile person, but I tend to be better with topics that are a little bit more creative or future oriented, or that are kind of attached to something that's happening right now. Hence the interesting risk.    H.J Ah, interesting, okay, and it's, yeah, also good hearing about that adaptability, which I think also flows through a lot of facilitators, practice or facilitation, and yeah, that whole movement online. I think it is amazing sometimes, as you say, to think how people can be connected online, but somehow, well, it's not somehow the magic happens. It's because we're brilliant facilitators.   J.C It is because we're brilliant facilitators and we can create a safe and a fun space. It's, it is incredible, and it's also something that you almost don't realise that you have a gift for until you get that feedback. Oh, that was great workshop. Oh, we made, you know, we made progress, or I felt I could speak up. During the lockdown, I volunteered as a facilitator for action for happiness, and I ran a monthly session, and each month we get to, oh, I've got to do that session again. Oh, like an hour and a half, and I go into it, and I had a co facilitator, and we'd be part way through the session, and the magic would start to happen. And you could feel, because lockdown was a very tough time for many people, and you could feel the magic of facilitation happen. You could feel people relax, open up, and at the end of the session, we'd always do this check in, and everybody without exception, every single one of those sessions we ran, people said, Oh, I feel better. All my energy levels have lifted, or I feel relaxed. And I just thought, wow.   H.J Yeah. And you get that real kind of lovely feeling in your body where you think, oh, yeah, this, this is, this is good. This is why I do this. Okay. And so you talk about, you know, your work, and then sort of almost discovering, I guess, that you are a facilitator, or that that's the thing that you can call what you do. When did you get more involved in the kind of the facilitation community and the IAF in particular. J.C So like many people who facilitate, I had been doing quite a lot of facilitation, without much formal training or orientation and without any awareness there was a facilitation community. So what kind of got me into the IAF was I, I'd been doing some team, like away day workshop, and I had, this is classic me, by the way, I kind of reinvented the wheel, not realising that there were lots of methods out there and and like ways of doing things. And after I did this workshop and probably kind of gave it far too much effort, I thought I actually need to get learn some technique here. I've got the interest, I've got the motivation, I've got the aptitude. I haven't got enough technique. So I went and did some training with ICA UK. I did, I think that their group facilitation skills course. And I think the trainer was Martin Gilbraith, who, at the time, I think, was very much a leading light in the IAF. And I joined the IAF, and then I kind of washed in and out of it a little bit. And when I started to get more involved was at one of the London meetups. That's, I think, when I started to become more actively involved. Realised it was a community. Realised that you could come gather, meet other people who facilitate and talk about facilitation. Wow, amazing, it's a thing.   H.J A big network of geeks where we get to talk about all of these tools and techniques and stuff and stationery, probably. And so you discovered, I guess then this community, what kind of drew you in more, what kept you going to, you know, maybe the London meetups or ?    J.C I really like, I like being part of communities. So even though I have my own business, I do like to collaborate with other people. I do like to be connected to other people. It's quite important for me. So there's quite a lot of community attached to coaching, which is another area I'm involved with. And I think once I identified there was community attached to facilitation, I was just interested in finding out more. And the meetups were definitely really good for that. And then the game changer for me was coming to my first IAF conference. I don't think I'd ever met, I had never met so many people interested in facilitation, all in one space. And also the diversity of practice was really, really, it was really inspirational for me. I had been toying with some more creative practices, not necessarily having the confidence to implement them. And at that conference, I saw people that were just going, you know, all in on their more creative facilitation practices. And I was like, wow. So I think it was that very first conference which really said, thought, these are my people, these are my tribes. We're all different from each other, and yet we've got this thing in common. And so it was the creative thing, a kind of curiosity about people, and I think another common thread was this desire to, desire to

    36 min

  8. 15/10/2024

    FS 72 Working as an Internal Facilitator with Cath Brooks from the Environment Agency

    In this episode Helene talks to Cath about her role as Senior Engagement Advisor and internal facilitator with the Environment Agency (EA) Cath tells Helene a bit about the EA and the type of work they do. She explains how her role as Engagement Advisor includes facilitation and also how she works an an independent internal facilitator for other projects withing the EA. Cath gives some examples of what she really enjoys about her role as a faciliator including working with the public on a climate adaptation project and working alongside external independent facilitators that the EA also use. She explains that external faciliatators are often used when more complex conversations need to be had, or where there has been a breakdown of trust and someone independent is needed. She shares some insights as to how the internal facilitators network of aroudn 200 facilitators was set up and how she balances her work as Senior Engagement Advisor and facilitator.  She tells Helene about a role play technique that really made a difference and about how asking good questions are crucial to her work as a faciliator. Cath also talks about how she keeps her faciliation skills up including attending the IAF England and Wales conferences, and local IAF meetups and EA facilitator learning days. She also shares some advice for other internal facilitators.  A full transcript is below. Today's Guest Environment Agency - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) facilitationnetworkmailbox@environment-agency.gov.uk   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 H.J Hello and welcome to Facilitation Stories, the community podcast of the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Helen Jewell, and my guest today is Cath Brooks, senior engagement advisor with the Environment Agency. Welcome, Cath    C.B Hi, yeah. Hi. How are you doing? Alright?   H.J I'm good. How are you?    C.B Yeah, good. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. I'm Looking forward to it.   H.J It's really good to have you on the podcast. Okay, so I have a whole load of questions to ask you, starting with the Environment Agency. I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about what the Environment Agency does and what your role is?   C.B Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I hope that it'll inspire people. I've worked at the Environment Agency for almost 20 years, and I still absolutely love it. It's a great organisation. So we're a public sector organisation, and we aim, quite simply, to protect and improve the environment. We employ about 12,000 people, and some people work nationally across England, and then some people work in area offices. We've got 14 different area offices across England, so you either work on national issues or you work on local issues in one of our area offices. And I guess to create places for people and wildlife, we work on quite a lot of topics that people are deeply concerned about, and finding ways forward can be difficult on some of the issues, people have strong opinions about the environment and how we should be managing the environment quite rightly. So Facilitation skills are really important in that context, with some of the really difficult issues that we're managing. So some of those topics are things like managing major industry, making sure they're not polluting the environment, and waste, dealing with contaminated land, making sure water quality of our rivers and we've got enough water so water resources as well, working on fisheries, conservation and ecology, and my area that I work on is management of flood risk. So those sorts of issues are really interesting, and people have strong opinions about how we should be managing those issues. So there can be quite a lot of conflict, I guess, which is why facilitation is so important.   H.J And so then, obviously that's quite a broad even under the umbrella of the environment, that's quite a broad range of different areas, and in your particular area then, in your role as senior engagement advisor, what does that actually involve? Sort of before, obviously, I guess facilitation is part of that, but I know you also do it sort of separately as well. What does your main role? What does your main role involve?   C.B Yeah, so we've got engagement advisors. Obviously, the organisation's quite technical organisation, quite science and engineering led, but we also have engagement and communications experts within the Environment Agency, and I'm one of those. So I work alongside quite technical teams, and at the moment I'm working, I've worked in lots of different parts of the organisation, but at the moment I'm working in flood risk management, supporting our teams. I work nationally, and so supporting our national teams with big projects where there's, they're difficult topics, where people have strong opinions. And my job, my main job, is engagement planning. So we're whatever the project is thinking about what are our engagement aims? Why do we want to work with our stakeholders? Why do they want to work with us, making sure we're not just thinking from the perspective of the Environment Agency, my job is to help our staff to think about the impact it's going to have on on a range of stakeholders, and plan the best methods that we can for that particular project to work out, how can we get the best from our stakeholders? How can they get the best of us? How can we find solutions that work for all of us, not just for the Environment Agency?    So we try to avoid taking what we've called in the past the 'decide, announce, defend approach'. My job is to help staff to be more, to sort of take a more 'engage, deliberate, decide', so to help have quality conversations about these difficult issues, really listen to our stakeholders, designing the right methods, really to help create that space for those quality conversations about what can be really difficult issues. And that's my job, is designing those sorts of engagement methods, if you like, and then facilitation sits really nicely alongside that.    H.J And so when you do that facilitation, I as far as I understand, you're part of an internal facilitators network. How, how did that kind of come about? When was that set up?    C.B Yeah, that's right. So when I joined the Environment Agency, back in 1996 we didn't have many people who worked in engagement roles or facilitation network. So we started really by setting up the engagement roles and setting up training for staff around comms and engagement and how to do that engagement planning like I've just talked about. And very quickly we realised actually there's another set of skills that that we need to develop as well, which is facilitation. So when you are designing methods that involve dialog, you know having facilitation skills, having skills to be able to design those interactive sessions in a way that you're making the most of that time when you've got your stakeholders in the room is really important. And it's quite a different skill, actually, than just engagement planning, being able to design a face to face or an online session where you've got people in the room making the very best of that time. So we're all really busy. Our staff are busy, our stakeholders are busy. So making the most of those opportunities, that's why we developed the facilitation skills courses.    So first of all, we started off by getting some expert engagement professionals in to help us design facilitation courses that were for in-house facilitators. And then very quickly, and within about 18 months, we realised that people were going on the training, really enjoying the training, but then struggling to apply the training in their day jobs, because, you know, you could go a couple of months and not use it. And we very quickly realised that if you're going to facilitate, and you have to do it quickly, you have to do it very often, and you need, you need to support each other. So we set the network up to give people safe space to be able to facilitate internally. So to develop people's skills and create opportunities to be able to facilitate not in your day job. So that's why the network was set up, was to, so people could put forward a facilitation request and get someone who wasn't their day job, they went and practised their skill outside their day job, which, which means you can facilitate in a more pure way which was, which has been fantastic. It's, it's worked really well.   H.J And I want to ask a little bit more about that, actually. But before I do, I just wanted to pick up on the differences between engagement and facilitation, and where you see the differences being?   C.B yeah, I do think they're quite different skills. So I think being able to do good engagement planning across a project, you think we've got big projects that might go on for years, and they're quite technical. You need to understand the, you know, the technical context of that bit of work, what the business objectives are, what the engagement objectives are, what best methods we can apply, you know, to help people to engage with us, and for that to have an impact on on the decision making, that's quite different. You could do that, and then you can realise in that process, there's usually going to have to be some kind of series of face to face events. But the person doing that engagement planning might not necessarily have this skill to be able to run that face to face content, an

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    IAF England Wales
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2025
  • Episodes
    81
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    ©2022 IAF ENGLAND AND WALES CHAPTER
  • Show Website
    Facilitation Stories

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