Facilitation for Successful Collaboration Programme – what to expect

The increasing pressure on time and budgets and the growing emphasis on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research mean that enabling constructive engagement between people with different perspectives has never been more important. How do you support researchers and non-academic stakeholders, across varying areas of expertise, busy diaries and their own agendas to build successful collaborations?

This programme aims to give you a practical framework and tools to approach facilitating these interactions with confidence. We’ll be sharing what we’ve found works – and doesn’t work – based on our experience of designing and facilitating collaborative workshops – in person, online and hybrid. There will also be opportunity for you to learn from each other, whether you are new to facilitating and have great questions to ask or you have hands-on experience and want to gain insight into how others approach things. We’ll send a short pre-workshop questionnaire to help us understand your facilitation experience and needs in more detail so that we can tailor what we cover.

Over the course of the five modules we’ll have opportunity to explore:

• Role of the facilitator
• Key ingredients: purpose, people, process
• How to build a collaborative climate
• How to handle it when things don’t go to plan
• And to answer your questions and discuss the kind of facilitation that you need to do

This is not a sit and listen kind of programme. We welcome your questions, challenges and ideas and look forward to some great discussions. We will be sharing frameworks and tools and there will be plenty of time to work in breakout groups and consider how you might apply what we are covering in your working world. If you have a workshop or collaborative event coming up then this is a great chance to make progress with your planning. Through working together, you’ll also have a chance to get to know your colleagues on the programme and build a support network for the future. The time between the weekly modules also gives an opportunity to test stuff out or simply to reflect and then bring any questions to the next module.

There is no need to do any preparation. Just come along with curiosity and an open mind, ready to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in.

We look forward to meeting you in February. Click here to register.

Caragh, Liz and Scott

Feedback from the previous cohort: “Thanks again to you all for an excellent course on facilitation. I found it really insightful and helpful. I also really appreciated how much discussion time was given to us in small groups. Hats off to Scott for the seamless tech! Amazing work. It was an example of best practice for anything we do online.”