Online Meet-Ups

Facilitated by Kerri Price – Founder, The Facilitators Network

Kick-start the new year by getting clear about the work you’d like to be doing in 2025. What type of facilitation really lights you up? What kind of people or organisations would you like to be working with? What do you need to say NO to in order to make room for the “Heck YES!”? What steps do you need to put in motion to make that happen?

This session will include lots of individual reflection, with the opportunity to share in small groups. We will be getting creative, so make sure you have some paper and felt pens on hand.

Facilitated by Alex Eisencheter, The AI Tinkerers Club

Based in France, Alex has been experimenting at the crossroads of facilitation, tech, and collective intelligence since 2012. Now he’s all about bringing artificial intelligence right into the heart of group sessions.  In this meet-up, Alex has 15 case studies of how you can use AI in the design, delivery and documentation of your workshops. You get to choose which ideas to you want to hear about and dive into!

Facilitated by Darryn Gray, Darryn Gray Consulting

Are you sometimes wondering if the learning/workshop you just delivered worked? Is anything happening differently as a result of what you delivered? Did the learning stick? Did the facilitation activity get the right outcomes? How do we know? How do we get meaningful feedback on our sessions?

Darryn is a learning designer, facilitator and coach who is passionate about learning evaluation–especially how we braid te ao Māori and Pākeha learning constructs together in what we do. This session will be a conversation on learning evaluation, grounded in a context fit for use in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Facilitated by Kerri Price – Founder, The Facilitators Network

For most of us, we’re well practiced at maintaining engagement throughout a regular workshop, but how do we maintain engagement when we are working with groups over extended periods of time. Perhaps it’s a multi-day training with long days back-to-back. Maybe it’s the same client you’re working with over several months. It could be just a reeeeeeally long day where the timing can’t be managed any other way.

In this session we’ll look at the fundamentals of group engagement and explore how those principles play out when working with groups over extended periods. As always, the wisdom will be in the room, so if you have ideas that work for you make sure you come prepared to share.

Facilitated by Carolyn Smith, Woven Collaboration

Imagine you are standing on a beach, with a large and vocal group of angry neighbours who are almost ready to fight?  Alongside them are agency staff, and you’ve been invited to try to resolve the issue. What would you do?

This is a true story. And Carolyn was the person asked to help!

Carolyn has had a long career working in communities and has been in quite a few of these situations. In this session, Carolyn will share a model that she uses to support groups from a place of polarisation and conflict, to finding shared solutions. This is a great chance to learn from someone who regularly works in the space.

Facilitated by Kerri Price – Founder, The Facilitators Network

As facilitators we can not make anyone feel anything, however we can create an environment where specific feelings have a good chance of showing up. Creating an environment where people feel safe is reasonable easy with a group of ‘positive strangers’ or a team that already feels safe together. However, if a team does not feel psychologically safe with each other before the workshop, what can we do in the workshop itself?

In this session we will explore questions like:

• What is psychological safety and how will we know if it exists within a group?
• What if we know the group lacks psychological safety before the workshop starts?
• Is it reasonable to expect a facilitator to create a ‘safe’ space for an ‘unsafe’ team, and if so, what does that look like?
• Are workshops the right vehicle for developing psychological safety within a team? If so, when and in what context? If not, what needs to happen first?

This session will be run as a series of small group discussions exploring deep questions in this context.

Facilitated by Kate Smith, KS Consulting

Kate is an experienced facilitator specialising in all things Strategy. In this meet-up, Kate will explore the difference between good strategy and bad strategy; why strategic planning is a misnomer; and offer some useful tools and frameworks for exploring strategy with your team or clients.

As always, this is a full participation session, so come prepared to share ideas, ask questions and get involved.

Facilitated by Leeann Bassett, Face Up Now Social Media

Linked In is a great tool for making yourself known, building relationships and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. Leeann has run meet-ups for us before, but this time she is doing things a little differently. This meet-up will be run as a Q&A session, so you can bring the specific questions you want answered. This meet-up will be particularly useful for independent facilitators, but everyone is welcome.