In-house Facilitator Training

In cooperation with a network of associates, I can design and deliver cutting-edge in-house facilitator training for your organisation. This will help

Training for Organisational and Group Leaders / Group Facilitators - One-year weekly training Programme

For some years I have been intending to organise a training for facilitators, that - rather than providing one-off piecemeal training events - will offer a sustained, ongoing learning environment. I am now aiming to set up a weekly training programme, to commence in 2010, in or near Oxford.

There is nothing like being in such an ongoing group to learn about how groups function, how they evolve, how they get stuck and how as individuals we are each uniquely affected by these processes and cope with them.

This one-year training will enable participants to develop a solid and flexible range of skills, capacity and awareness as well as self-knowledge

 

The COMMUNITAS Project - Leadership in Groups, Teams, Organisations

Together with my colleagues Gaie Houston and Thom Osborn, I am setting up a weekly training for Organisational and Group Leaders / Group Facilitators some time in 2010.

As a pilot and preparation for this training, we are organising a few introductory Information Evenings, then a weekend in the spring of 2009 (March 21 & 22), followed by a unique 5-day event in autumn 2009.

 

This training will be of interest to anybody involved with groups and what we each can do and contribute to make them as productive as we can, but especially those with leaderships responsibility for groups. Leaders, facilitators and managers in all kinds of social organsiations will find that the kind of large group learning community we are envisaging provides a unique environment for intense and profound learning about what really makes groups of people tick. We will co-create a kind of mini-society where we can experience and learn to understand and work with all the dynamics which go on in groups and organisations.

One difference in this kind of 'social laboratory' is that we will have time and space to attend to these dynamics and experiment with them in a way which is not usually possible in the heat and task orientation of the 'real world'. This is a rare opportunity to immerse yourself in a diverse collective organism which is bound to both affect you deeply as well as being open to being influenced and shaped by you. It is important to us that the large group reflects the multi-cultural reality of the modern Britain we live and operate in, and we therefore invite participants from all kinds of constituencies and social groupings.

As the tutors, we will bring to this experience a wealth of psychological understanding and a spectrum of techniques and practical tools which is diverse and comprehensive, allowing the group to maximise their learning by drawing on these resources.

• What psychological dynamics within and between people are at work to make groups and organisations tick or flounder ?
• How do groups and organisations get blocked from functioning at their full potential ?
• What makes for an inspiring and vibrant organisational culture that is adaptable and robust, stable and innovative ?
• How does organisational culture get generated and replicated, what makes it stagnate or evolve ?
• How can you as an individual lead, manage, facilitate, participate, contribute in such a way as to bring the best out of the groups and organisations you are involved with ?
• What personal skills, qualities and capacities are required for this and how can these be further developed ?
• How can both leadership and co-operation, initiative and participation, activity and receptiveness, doing and being be valued and enhanced ?
• What kind of psychological tools, structures and paradigms are needed to do justice to the fast pace and complexity of 21st-century organisations ?
• How can you both participate and exert influence in the groups which constitute your social world ?

The events we are organising will provide - in a kind of social laboratory setting - an experiential learning environment and community where you can explore and find your answers to these questions in an immediate and profound way.

The three tutors - Gaie Houston, Thom Osborn & Michael Soth - bring to this endeavour decades of group and organisational experience, a wealth of relevant knowledge and skills, an integrative stance which embraces the best from the whole spectrum of approaches available and a passion for working in groups. The events promise to become unique learning and training experiences both on personal and professional levels.

We have designed a sequence of events, offering opportunities for increasing depth and commitment and consequently deeper learning, ranging from Open Evenings to a Weekend Experience, a 5-day Residential and an ongoing weekly one-year Training Group.

For further details, please explore the rest of this site www.integralfacilitation.org.uk/ or email us at michael@integralfacilitation.org.uk.

If you want to help spread the word and increase the diversity of participants on these events, we are more than happy to send you copies of our leaflet for you to distribute to interested parties. We aim to reach a wide variety of professional communities across private, public and voluntary sectors - for a detailed list of target groups and possible participants and professions, see www.integralfacilitation.org.uk/participants.html.

 

Why we need this kind of Training in Organisational and Group Leadership, Group Facilitation, Group Dynamics - my view

It seems to me that many areas of group leading, both in the field of counselling and psychotherapy as well as in organisations across the private, public and voluntary sectors, suffer from an absence of psychological depth and skill. There is a whole range of theories, knowledge and skills, derived from a variety of fields but especially including psychological and therapeutic disciplines, which can radically enhance how we organise social activities, community processes and co-operation.

 

Social organisation depends on groups, meetings and social events, and social structures are replicated or evolve through groups. To some extent our future depends on how productively we can co-operate in the various groups that constitute our social world. That in turn seems to depend on bringing an integrative and depth psychological perspective to groups and how to organise, lead and facilitate them as well as participate in them.

However, psychological approaches to group leading and group facilitation, as well as to management of groups and organisational development have been just as fragmented as the field of counselling and psychotherapy (for example, theories of group leading have a similar humanistic-psychoanalytic divide as psychotherapy has had for many years). This new training sets out to be integrative and non-partisan, embracing the various approaches to groups, the diverse orientations, theories and techniques, both therapeutic and otherwise.