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Transformative Design Trainings
Design matters! Structure your event for success
Are you in charge of bringing together groups of people online where success depends on the quality of the interaction among the participants? Are you looking for strategies to increase engagement, collaboration, and productivity?
This six-part Facilitation Skills workshop series will give you:
– a framework for design
– structures and tools to achieve your stated goals
– improvisational principles to shift your mindset to serve the group as effectively as possible in-the-moment.
Fundamentally, we believe that all voices matter, people are wired for connection, and co-creation is at the heart of any meaningful, collective action. We build our workshops around these principles.
In our highly interactive transformative design trainings you learn key principles and facilitation techniques that maximize engagement and inclusivity in your events by bringing out the best in each person and in the group as a whole.
Keystone Workshop
Design for Transformation:
Create Engaging Online Events Using a Coaching Framework
Make your upcoming workshops, events, and gatherings more engaging and impactful by applying a simple, goal-oriented, 5-stage coaching framework to your design.
In this interactive workshop you will learn a framework we've adapted from team coaching that keeps people engaged at each step of the way, without relying on a single activity or presenter to carry your event.
You will learn
* A simple 5-step framework to apply to your online events or trainings
* Techniques to scaffold skills, behaviors, and complexity to maximize engagement
* How structure supports inclusivity, psychological safety, and managing power dynamics
* Practical insights, activities, and tools to apply to your own programs
To get the most out of this program, bring an event, meeting, training, or workshop you are designing or have influence over the design. We will be walking you through each of the design steps in the framework.
Transformative Design Series
Designing for Meaningful Engagement Every Step of the Way
Session 1
The series begins with our signature workshop on the 5-stage framework, which will serve as the practical and conceptual foundation for the entire series. In this session we’ll introduce the core principles that guide future design decisions and you’ll use the framework build the overall structure of your event. From this you’ll quickly identify any critical missing elements and strategize about how to represent them in your design.
Aiming High: Designing With The End in Mind
Session 2
Creating a clear picture of what success looks like for your event and how you will know if you’ve obtained it is one of the most essential and often skipped over steps in the design process. Doing this upfront will streamline future design decisions and make sure you are meeting the goals of key stakeholders. In this session we will walk you through a practical framework from leadership coaching to articulate your big picture goals and essential stakeholders both for the event itself and who needs to be involved in the design process. We will also address how to collect accurate and meaningful data that is of greatest value to your participants, donors, sponsors, decision makers and the next steps of the process. You will leave this session with a coaching framework that you can apply to any gathering you are designing, clarity about any missing people to invite into your process, and tools for data collection and evaluation.
Crafting Each Step: Cornerstone Activities and Key Choices
Session 3
With the clear goal in mind, what are the specific building blocks that will make your event successful? In this session we will present different types of online activities and how you can modify them to align with the specific goals and needs of your group. You will identify predictable challenges you’ll likely encounter in your event, such as entrenched perspectives, audience disengagement, or speakers that go on and on without stopping. In each case we’ll address how small and strategic design choices can keep your program on track and your people engaged.
Creating Connection Online
Session 4
You have 7 seconds to make a first impression. So what do you do when people arrive with cameras off, barely paying attention, and thinking about the last meeting they clicked out of seconds ago?
In this session you’ll learn how to create a strong start, and to build a sense of connection and meaning as your event progresses. We’ll share specific activities that build trust and cohesion in online events, when to use them, and how to adapt them to your group’s cultural norms, expectations, and level of engagement. You’ll learn how to anchor people’s attention to their own goal from the start and how to work with individual and collective goals to keep the momentum going throughout your event. In addition, from in-person events we know the most meaningful exchanges often happen outside of the formal program in hallways and over lunch. Learn how to design for these same high-value moments in an online program that create energy and make use of the vast and often untapped expertise of the people in the room.
This is a fun and highly interactive session filled with useful activities, practical insights, and small adjustments that you can immediately apply to your own sessions.
Generating Traction: Maximizing Value In and Beyond Your Event
Session 5
Is your event leaving people overwhelmed with content with false hopes that they will integrate what you’ve shared when in reality you know that as soon as they get back to the rest of their day they’ll likely immediately forget most of what happened in your room? How many times have you been to events like this?
Especially when we’re working online, it is wishful thinking that people will take the time to meaningfully integrate the experience outside of the time boundaries of the event. We’ve all heard “less is more” but how do you do this? In this session we’ll address how to build in activities and time that support people in integrating what they are learning and apply it critically to their own experience. By doing this people create their own buy-in along the way, independently of whether or not they agree with a particular speaker or viewpoint presented.
In this session we’ll address how to coach people into their own meaningful insights and facilitation structures that support the group in reflecting on its own insights, making decisions, and identifying next steps for both individual and collective action. As a result people will get incredible value out of your event and talk about it for days and weeks to come.
Agile Facilitation: Game-Time Decisions and Managing the Unexpected
Session 6
Once your event begins your best laid plans are put to the test. Will the group respond to your design? What do you do when personalities and power dynamics threaten to overrun the energy and momentum of the group? In this session we’ll discuss the principles that guide your role as a facilitator and how to make strategic choices in the moment. We’ll look at tools to direct the group’s attention to itself such as polling, synchronous writing, and unconferencing and how to use the information generated from these processes to adjust your course as a facilitator.
From this workshop you’ll gain an appreciation for how being online gives you unique access to addressing power dynamics directly and productivity addressing challenging issues. You’ll leave this session with new tools and clarity of how to make courageous and principled decisions in the moment in service of the group’s goals.