Author:

Happy New Year!    We at InsightsNow would like to wish you all the best as you kick off your calendar year and welcome 2018.  As you kick off your marketing and research initiatives and evolve your brands’ plans, consider whether you could benefit from professional facilitation to ensure that your growth is strategic and you make changes for the better.

Why might you need professional facilitation?

Your team has strong leaders, that’s not a need-gap. You are all deeply involved in and vested in the outcome of many critical conversations regarding your strategies for marketing, sales and growth. You have plenty of effective meetings and are smart, capable professionals.

Yet sometimes your meetings are ineffective, and you leave them feeling like nothing was accomplished, thinking you aren’t any closer to moving forward strategically, and wondering how to get unstuck.

That’s when you need professional facilitation for a strategic planning or internal brainstorming session.

To jumpstart your 2018, I’d like you to think about facilitation and how your team could benefit from it. And I’d like you to think about it in a different way …

A technique, largely utilized in the problem-solving method of Synectics, is to take a metaphorical excursion into another world for inspiration into a challenge or question.

For example, if you look to the outdoor world for answers to “why might you need professional facilitation,” you might consider a mountain guide, encouraging clients to take their next steps towards the summit: not pulling them up but helping them avoid pitfalls and get to the top safely. If you look to the world of sports for inspiration to that same question, specifically the world of rowing, you might consider the Coxswain, who helps to steer the boat, making tactical calls, and providing race positioning, motivation and encouragement to the crew.

Strong facilitation is not a replacement for your team’s capable leadership – it’s guidance with a process, freeing up your team from having to think that process so they can focus on content.

InsightsNow has expanded its services to include professional facilitation.

Our experts are trained and experienced in a variety of methodologies and at a facilitated session will:

• Provide a structure for your team to work within, without taking their leadership roles away from them. Your team always owns and provides the content as key stakeholders.
• Focus on how the conversation proceeds, ensuring that the discussion moves along constructively, objectives are met and hurdles don’t become stop-gates.
• Manage group/team dynamics and norms so that tense moments are handled functionally, all participants have a voice, and everyone buys into the outcome.
• Leverage a vast number of tools and techniques to address known and in-the-moment needs that lead to the clarification of challenges and the generation and/or development of ideas, outcomes or strategies.

How can you get started?

 Just like a strong research effort, powerful meetings, brainstorming sessions and workshops begin with a well-defined meeting purpose and objectives. From there, InsightsNow professionals develop a draft agenda, collaborate with you to ensure it meets your goals, work with you on the logistics, and plan for a successful event culminating in the development of plan of action your team will be able to effectively implement.

If you are interested in learning more about our expert facilitation, please reach out to Karen Lynch, our Senior Director, Qualitative Insights at karen.lynch@insightsnow.com.

 By Karen Lynch