Please click on “Yes! And… Facilitate more creative meetings” above to reveal a series of articles that will enable you to facilitate your people to be more creative in workshops and training. Once revealed, please click on the title of the article to obtain a PDF download. You can obtain Adobe Reader to read the PDF, by clicking on the red box below.

Developing a Team Using Solutions Focus

Do you need to motivate and develop an underperforming team? In this article, we describe how you might use a “Solutions Focus” approach to achieve this. We illustrate the approach using a recent workshop and include tips on how to maintain momentum back at work


Integrating Projects Using Large Scale Mapping

Do you and your colleagues have to prepare and share plans for business or major projects? Would an approach to present and share separate plans in an integrated way be of help? One which helps people develop and understand the overall picture in an interesting and participative way?

Creating New Ideas Using a Structured Methodology

A utility company wanted to perform significantly better than the minimum demanded by the regulators. In this article we describe the idea generation process that enabled the client to achieve this, creating ideas primarily to improve internal and crossboundary processes. One idea enabled them to reduce the time required for a fundamental process from 54 days to 7 days. We also outline for you the process they used to: define challenges, create great ideas and evaluate them. Finally we discuss how senior management can make a better choice of ideas in which to invest.

Building Partnership With Internal or External Clients

Do you work with partners? Do you want to improve a relationship with your clients to increase your revenues? Are there difficulties in a current client relationship you need to resolve? In this case study, we explain how our client developed business by holding workshops with their clients to find a shared value proposition. We explain how you can do this and identify key learning points.

Creatively Reducing Risk

Do you and your colleagues have to deliver a project? Would you find it useful to use a researched approach to identify potential issues and help avoid them? One which involves the whole project team in an interesting and participative way? “Prevaluation” does that. This case study explains how we used the approach with a client with great success.

Metaphor and Its Use

Great creative leaders (witness Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech) use metaphor a great deal to illustrate, persuade and inspire. Metaphors influence how you think and how you act. In this article, we explore the use of metaphor and its structure. We show how metaphors help shape your thinking and the thinking of others. We also illustrate how you can use them in practical ways in work and workshops.

The following articles were published in Train the Trainer by Fenman

Facilitating a Creative Problem Solving Session

Have you ever left a problem solving meeting with other participants muttering, ‘It’s the right solution for the wrong problem’, or discovered a week later that some people have taken no action because, they say, ‘I never really agreed to it’? If you facilitate it well, the creative problem-solving (CPS) method can help you guide a 
team to overcome these issues. The process can lead them to solutions that are more original, that people can agree on and that they want to implement. In this article we explain how you can facilitate a meeing using CPS.

Using Energisers in Meetings

An energiser is a form of activity designed to stimulate and enliven a group, to change its state. It may also be used to relax a group, so perhaps ‘energiser’ is always not the right word to use. However, it is rooted in facilitator and trainer jargon, so we use it in this article. A well-timed, appropriate energiser may achieve its purpose and make learning or other group activity easier; but, used inappropriately, it may annoy and embarrass participants, and make the facilitator look foolish. In this article we shall look at some of the good and bad points about energisers, when they are appropriate and how we can best use them to help us achieve our workshop aims.

Using Improvisation in Training

The public became aware of Improvisational Comedy (typically called “impro” in the UK) from the hit show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” But “serious” theatre uses improvisation too, developing skills that organisations can adopt to: Deal with new situations with more agility, think more flexibly and communicate more powerfully. For good or bad, unpredictable events happen and those organisational “scripts”, plans and “to do” lists fail. But even when the event is predictable, people can find themselves in new situations e.g through mergers and strategic partnerships, where no “script” exists. This article provides you with an understanding of how you can use improvisation in organisations.

Creative Techniques for Trainers

Do you ever ask: ‘How can we provide more value in our training department?’ Have you ever tackled a difficult situation with your colleagues and struggled to identify the core issues? Have you begun to design a training programme and been stumped for fresh ideas? Do you seek new ways to involve participants in your development programmes? Would you like to find new ways to promote your training courses or set your courses apart from the crowd? You can tackle all of these things (and more), using creative thinking techniques.This article shows you how to review creative techniques you can use to enhance the development, delivery and promotion of training courses.