Case Study
The Facilitation Partnership
Support for Facilitators - working with Helen Chapman
The brief
The leader of a large regional leadership team planned a two-day offsite to bring his team together with the purpose of unlocking the power of their potential as one connected and collaborative team. It was facilitated by Helen Chapman, and Ellie Chapman partnered her to bring conversations to life visually. With 32 members in all, the team was diverse in terms of geography, culture, knowledge and experience. They worked in a number of offices spread across South East Asia. Until that point, their working relationships had been growing slowly and remotely, and this would be the first time the whole team would meet as one.
9
nationalities
32
people
2
days
A close up of the big mind map we created live as the group came up with 48 reasons why their organisation is beautiful.
How we worked
Before:
We worked closely with Helen to prep for the meeting and designed templates and charts that worked alongside her design.
During
Superb start: after the welcome and set-up for success, the team worked in small groups to generate, capture and share the reasons to feel proud of their organisation. This created free-flowing contributions which Ellie captured in-the-moment onto a big, beautiful mind map. This gave the team a powerful opening to the meeting.
Mindful middle:The team then began to explore elements of team working:
Team purpose
Shared goals
Where teamwork was working
Where improvements were needed
Their personal contribution to all of the above.
'If you don’t realise you’re part of the problem, you’re not part of the solution' - William Torbert, Seven Transitions Of Leadership
As the team discussed, shared and explored, their observations and insights were captured by Ellie, providing a visual record of their growing narrative. This also helped them see that they were moving through conversations together towards shared agreements.
By the end of Day 1, the team were in flow together and, in this large group of 32 people, everyone was able to see their own contributions on the walls around them.
On Day 2, Helen and Ellie welcomed everyone back and used the visuals from the previous day's conversations to recap not only the key insights and messages, but also the vibrant atmosphere they had shared. This provided the ideal foundation for deeper conversations about their shared ‘Elephants In The Room’. Ellie created clear and purposeful templates to support the group as they engaged in some important but tricky conversations. The templates gave the small groups a shared focal point which meant the conversations were able to be objective and valuable.
The result we got
- A graphic Game Plan
- A narrative of the entire two-days
- And they all lived happily every after
To me it was a great experience and I was amazed how people started to open up without fear (in front of the group) and how we started to put topics on the table and started to address. Impressive.
Global Director
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