Media Coverage of My Company, Elstar

Extract from the monthly Business Review, published by the Reading Chronicle. This short piece introduces my unique approach to consultancy - helping business and public organisations resolve issues, make decisions and plan projects and services. Read more about accelerating your business at www.elstar-consulting.com.

Active Facilitation on Squidoo

See my Lens at Squidoo Business. It brings together sources for facilitation and mapping. Click on the image (left).

Festival Of Facilitation

Edinburgh October 5th - 7th 2007

In October 2007, the 13th IAF European Conference will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland. Follow this link for details and registration.

Visual Facilitation

The Citizens Advice Bureau in Reading, England are developing a new service. I planned and facilitated a workshop to achieve a number of goals. One goal was to define the activity model to guide the coaches who would deliver the service.

The starting point was for each participant to list their individual view of the activities, one per Post-It note. All Post-Its were then stuck on the wall and reviewed by the group as whole.

I provided an empty template to help the group synthesise their individual ideas. Having achieved a consensus, I quickly drew a summary of the model they had built and discussed.

Following the workshop this was redrawn on the computer. You can see the key steps illustrated by actual images from the workshop.

Visual Map or Graphic Facilitation

One feature of my job as a facilitator is to help people visualise the subject we are dealing with. Mapping is an obvious tool to use. I created this visual map in preparation for a workshop and used the map from the start to help the group better engage with the subject, making it more memorable in the process. Click on the image to see a larger version.

with acknowledgements to Nancy Margulies, author of Mapping Inner Space