About the Course
Do you want to know how to engage from 30 to 1,000 people in meaningful and productive conversations? Our training gives you the foundational knowledge and tools you need. We train you in the most important large group facilitation methods currently used around the world for dialogue and collaborative, strategic action.
The facilitated training will allow participants to gain a working knowledge of the principles, steps, and practices of World Café, Open Space Technology, and Appreciative Inquiry. Furthermore, you will become acquainted with methods such as the Caravan, Fishbowl, and Timelines.
With these approaches you can change any conference or similar large group gathering into a highly informative, productive, and results-driven session. The training will also equip you to better design future events.
Course Objective and Outcome
- Design and successfully conduct a World Café
- Apply Open Space Technology at the right time and in the right way
- Practice Appreciate Interviews, small group learning, and large group synthesis as part of the Discovery Phase of Appreciative Inquiry while learning how to conduct an AI Summit
- Learn when to apply and not to apply the various methods
- Get acquainted with additional methods for large group facilitation such as the fishbowl and caravan methods
About the Trainer – Mr. Jost Wagner
Jost Wagner is a Certified Professional Facilitator © through the International Association of Facilitators and the founder and Managing Director of The Change Initiative Co. Ltd. His talent, skills, and passion for facilitation form the core of the company’s mission, and he is much sought after as a facilitator, trainer, and process consultant.
Jost has written a handbook on large group facilitation methods for a Thai audience that has been now translated into various languages including Vietnamese, Burmese, and Urdu. In recent years, Jost has become one of the biggest contributors to the art and science of facilitation in many parts of Asia.
Methodology
Open Space Technology (OST) is an innovative meeting methodology for organizational transformation, as well as a philosophy towards how complex organizations develop and self-organize. In Open Space meetings, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of real importance.
With groups of 5 to 1,000 participants, the common result is a powerful connecting of people, sharing of what is happening in the organization, and strengthening of a common vision. Open Space Technology has the potential to transform organizations and has been applied by many international organizations and Fortune 500 companies.
In the mid-1990’s Juanita Brown and David Isaacs developed the World Cafe Methodology based on the core concept of conversational leadership and seven design principles they found that enabled informal, inclusive, and authentic dialogue and creative thinking around critical strategic issues.
This methodology is now widely used in many different settings and is found to be effective in situations where you want to involve large groups of stakeholders in authentic and stimulating discussions about a strategic issue in order to come up with new ideas and solutions that are mutually owned. World Café gathers people at small tables to engage in conversations that matter. This easy to use method for fostering collaborative dialogue, particularly in large groups, keeps people moving, thinking outside the box and building on one another’s ideas as they rotate from table to table.
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a way of looking at organizational or social change that focuses on doing more of what is already working rather than on fixing problems. It mobilizes strategic change by focusing on the core strengths of an organization, then uses those strengths to reshape the future. AI was developed by Professor David Cooperrider and his associates at Case Western Reserve University in the mid-eighties.
Appreciative Inquiry looks deeply into the root causes of success and generates possibilities and plans for bringing dreams to life. Appreciative Inquiry is an ideal planning and management tool because it catalyzes a cascade of conversations about what has been most successful, most meaningful, and most alive.