XCOA-901 the art of Facilitation Design

This course will focus on critical building blocks for a powerful facilitation and then move into skills needed to craft productive, thought-provoking, and inspirational meetings and gatherings that are aligned with the needs of multiple stakeholders. Participants will use an adapted form of the Design Thinking process, popularized by Stanford’s Design school and the consulting firm IDEO, to create a concrete, iterative structure for the design of relevant, creative, and impactful facilitated experiences. Participants will tackle questions such as: How do you design to best meet the needs of your participants? How can you frame the facilitate experience to be purposeful and relevant? How can you come up with creative, inspiring modalities that advance the group’s work? And, how might you experiment to ensure that you are on the right track before the actual facilitation? Instructors will teach the basic methodology of design thinking, and delve into each aspect of the technique in depth as it relates to facilitation design. In addition, participants will learn how to facilitate innovative modalities like Open Space, Adaptive Case Studies, Asset Mapping, and more.

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Design and “wireframe” a facilitated experience
• Collect the appropriate intelligence based on the group’s needs
• Distinguish the four aspects of design thinking: immersing, framing, imagining, and prototyping, as they relate to facilitation design
• Craft learning objectives with an eye towards broadening and deepening the skills, knowledge and aptitudes of others