​My Future Festival Debrief:

Facilitation Coaching Case Study

The Business Improvement team provided high impact short term coaching for Emily Napier, part of Student Futures, to design and run a workshop to debrief after their high-profile event “My Future Festival”.

IS Scoops talks to Email Napier to find out more:

What was the outcome you were seeking?

From the debrief meeting after our “My Future Festival” event we wanted to share data, but, mostly create innovation for next year's event.

Why did you ask Steve to help?

Steve was recommended as an expert in facilitation, and I wanted to ensure we got the best out of the short time we had been able to allocate for this meeting.

So what did you do (with Steve, and, in your event)?

I met with Steve who provided some structure for the two hour meeting. This 30 minute intensive coaching session also addressed how to get the best from the participants within that slot.

Following that stuff changed however, I briefed my colleague Jo Haddrick who was co facilitating with me. She had just attended an event with Duncan Wardle on creativity and innovation. Jo introduced an affirmative approach from this, including the notion of nurturing ideas, but, we kept the broad agenda the same.

On the day we had 12 participants including ourselves. The space wasn't ideal, but, we worked with it. We started with a welcome, thank you, ran through the agenda (from big to small). We realised we were reviewing something we had not set a clear goals for, so our first exercise was to consider what the benefits would be to different stakeholders of having an event next year.

Then we brainstormed all our big ideas, posted these in themes. We then parked this, to look at the data about what had happened. This led to some really good conversations.

Following this we gave each participant five sticky dots and asked them to vote on an idea or a theme what was important to investigate further, what ideas were worth nurturing.

These votes identified three obvious winners of the ideas to talk about, and we broke into three groups who each talked about one idea, to identify how we could actually make these things work in actions.

As an output of that group discussion we have one person from each group typing up notes, which will make the plan for next year's event, for the project working group to take forward.

As a closing thing we asked people to indicate what words we would like to see and hear at the end of the event when it was successful.

What are your reflections on how the event ran?

We need better space, we had a good mix of team members, although we could have done with some more representation.

It felt really positive, and it hasn't always. If felt like everyone was working together for the common good which was something I wanted to encourage. That's why we reached out to Steve.

For this event the framework we chose to use enabled us to keep a level of positivity; we used an appreciative enquiry approach (without naming that approach) which helped generate good ideas.

I would observe that in the past this was thought that it would be one person's job, but, now it feels more like a shared project, which is a good thing. Feels more like a collaboration now.

Everyone was engaged and positive. Everyone inputted. The model helped with that... Although people could have switched their phone off (but it was ok!).

So what did you learn?

I need to do more facilitation and practice it! I don't do this very often, I don't tend to naturally put myself forward to do it. I benefited from co facilitating, which supported me to experiment a bit.

We've learned about consciously working together, to build collaboration. And across the teams too.

I'd love more preparation time next time!

But all in all the session was great at avoiding a "blame" type culture which was brilliant. We got the learning around what to improve, but, through a positive approach... Which we hope will make the outcomes more likely to stick.

There has been anecdotal feedback from participants that they thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and that it was just the way we should be working together.

What difference did working with Steve make?

It meant we have a designed structure that got the best out of people, and we couldn't have done that without Steve's input. Facilitation coaching is a really valuable resource that people don't know about.

Thank you Steve!

For more information about facilitation services generally, or coaching around facilitating a particular event such as in this case study, drop Steve Yorkstone a line on s.yorkstone@napier.ac.uk