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Facilitation Stories

Facilitation Stories

Di: IAF England Wales
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Facilitation: the art of enabling a group of people to achieve a common goal. IAF England Wales brings you a show by facilitators, for facilitators and anyone interested in using facilitation for change. We'll share guest stories, experiences and methods. Plus, we'll bring you up to date on what's happening at our Meetups.©2022 IAF ENGLAND AND WALES CHAPTER Economia Ricerca del lavoro Scienze sociali Successo personale
Episodi
  • 🎙️FS85 - Authenticity and Accountable Grounding with AI

    🎙️FS85 - Authenticity and Accountable Grounding with AI
    Sep 24 2026
    What does it mean to be yourself on purpose as a facilitator, especially in a world increasingly shaped by AI? In the latest episode of IAF England & Wales' Facilitation Stories, Sam Moon sits down with Hannah Boneham, Co-Founder of Facilitate Sheffield, for a conversation about authenticity, accountability, community and belonging. They explore what inspired Hannah to set up Facilitate Sheffield and how facilitation communities can create spaces where people feel a genuine sense of connection and belonging. They also talk about authenticity in practice, finding your own way of holding a room, and staying grounded and accountable as AI becomes increasingly part of our work. And, continuing the thread from the previous episode, Hannah reflects on learning from mistakes and what those experiences have taught her along the way. Quote highlights "What I will never do is use it to design workshops end to end, or plug in outputs from client workshops and ask it to do the analysis without me also separately having done the analysis." "You can really be yourself. You can be authentically you, so long as you are in a place where that authenticity helps bring people together to solve the problems that they have in front of them." "There are some absolutely tremendous people, wonderful talent, and so very generous with their skills and experience... it brings so much joy and it makes facilitation not just a profession, but a community that I really love." Sam: Hello and welcome to Facilitation Stories, the community podcast of the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as the IAF. My name is Sam Moon and my guest today is Hannah Bonham. Hannah is a facilitator specialising in change management and organisational development, and as a CEO of Leadwell, a social enterprise and consultancy based in Sheffield. So, Hannah, to kick off with tell me what, in your world of facilitation is making you smile at the moment? Hannah audio: Thank you, Sam. And can I say, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me. Sam: Thank you, Hannah. Hannah audio: what's making me smile? So, the obvious and, first answer that rushed to my mind when you asked the question was the community of facilitators that I've gotten to know over the last few years. There are some absolutely tremendous people, wonderful talent, and so very generous with their skills and experience and this network, this space that we've all chosen to occupy together. It brings so much joy and, it makes facilitation not just a profession, but a community that I really love that. Sam: Tell me a bit about what you love about that. What does that mean to you, Hannah? Hannah audio: Well, I'm an extreme extrovert and I don't say that lightly. I really do, like, at the end of a day's facilitation, I come home absolutely pumped because I've just spent the day interacting with people the whole time and I really enjoy it. It's something I have to watch and manage in terms of how my energy can come across and I can be a lot. So my husband tells me from time to time and the fact that there are a huge range of different kinds of people from different walks of life, the different backgrounds and skills and perspectives and who present different challenges and ideas. It's such a rich tapestry facilitation with so many amazing different people and it really feeds me. I get a huge amount from it and I hope I give a lot back to it as well. 'cause I get a lot of enjoyment from spending time with those people. Sam: Say and in danger of putting you on the spot here. Is there anything that comes to mind that have been highlights of this shared community and, the gifts that you discover when your inner community of facilitators and things that surprise you that you weren't expecting? Hannah audio: Yeah. Yeah. So I was one of the co-founders of Facilitate Sheffield, which is the Sheffield branch of the IAF, the meetup. I co-founded that with Jane Clift, who has been a guest on this podcast herself. And Jane and I starting that off, we literally met for a coffee and we were like, we can't be the only facilitators in Sheffield. Who else is here? How should we find them? And growing that from that conversation, just the two of us to the next, I think it was the next month when we had nine or 10 different people come along, two of whom agreed to then be co-lead. So I now co-lead along with Angel Takooree and Helen Todd. And we now have last count, I cannot remember, something like 50 or 60 members that come to sessions every two months. And each time we have a different person volunteer to facilitate a session, which means that we get to learn a completely new topic and we get to experience someone else's kind of key skillset. So you get two for one, right? Because you're not just like experiencing the facilitation of that person, but you're also learning how they do it. You might pick up a new tip or ...
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    26 min
  • 🎙️FS84 - Dealing with disruptive behaviours, with Alan Heckman

    🎙️FS84 - Dealing with disruptive behaviours, with Alan Heckman
    Aug 7 2026
    In today's episode, Umah welcomes facilitator Alan Heckman to share practical ways to handle disruptive behaviours in groups, drawing on his IAF England and Wales conference workshop and his background with ICA training. They talk about: Common challenges, from subtle withdrawal to over-participation to barbed comments Mango's in facilitation!Setting informal norms and tools for helping people feel heard while keeping the process moving. The facilitator personaAddressing hierarchy by depersonalising ideasUsing the group to redirect off-topic derailments. Quote highlights "The very first thing that I say is, 'Hi, my name is Alan. I'm a group facilitator. This is what I think a group facilitator is.'""What you need is not for the person to stop talking, usually. What you need is to make them a little bit more of a process-aware participant.""Usually, they're concerned about something important, something that they aren't feeling heard about or that they love or think is really critical... They keep talking because they fear it won't come out in the final result." "If somebody steps up and is being angry or disruptive...you might try asking them...'Can I ask you a question?' followed by 'What is it that would have to take place for you to find this process worth engaging with?'" Links Today's guest - Alan Heckman: Facilitator and Facilitation Trainer Alan's website: www.alanheckman.co.uk Alan's Email: alan@alanheckman.co.uk Alan's Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/alanheckman For more information on the courses Alan runs, and to learn more about ICA:UK: www.ica-uk.org.uk/courses Today's host: Umah: Change and Transformation Advisor and Facilitator https://www.linkedin.com/in/umah To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF: 🎧 https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/ 📧 podcast@iaf-ew.co.uk 🌐https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF England & Wales Chapter: 🎧 https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/ 📧 podcast@iaf-ew.co.uk 🌐https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales Transcript Umah: Hello, and welcome to Facilitation Stories. This podcast is brought to you by the England & Wales Chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Umah, and today, we're going to hear about dealing with disruptive behaviours. This year at the IAF England & Wales Conference, I had the privilege of attending Alan Heckman's workshop on dealing with disruptive behaviours. His insights into managing group dynamics were both enlightening and practical. Alan is a seasoned facilitator with over 20 years of experience in designing participatory processes and events, particularly in the public and charitable sectors. He's known for fostering genuine engagement where every voice contributes effectively towards decisions that everyone commits to. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Alan Heckman to our podcast. Welcome, Alan. Alan: Hello, Umah. Thank you so much for having me. Umah: Alan, your session at the IAF conference was really insightful. Could you share with our listeners a little bit about the work that you do and what brought you to facilitation as a career? Alan: So I'm unusual in the field of facilitation in that I was doing it from a relatively young age. I took a year out of university when I was 20 to do a year-long volunteer internship with the ICA in Phoenix, Arizona. Many of your listeners might already know that ICA is a community organization deeply involved in participatory practice, and was helpful, among other things, in founding the IAF, but also in setting facilitation as a field and in taking participatory approaches and running trainings in facilitation as well. So from that internship in, a long time ago, I had various roles that were related to participation and facilitation. I haven't been a full-time facilitator ever since. But I did move into independent practice as a freelance facilitator in 2015, which is now 11 years ago. So I've been doing this for quite a long time. Umah: Thank you. That's really interesting to know about the background and the connection with ICA and IAF as well. Alan: It is interesting. ICA probably doesn't have as good of a profile or as big of a profile as perhaps it should, but it is really interesting. Umah: At the conference, in your presentation, you spoke about different behaviours and I just wondered if you could share maybe a few of the common ones that you've encountered and how you handled them. Alan: Absolutely. So I run these two-day group facilitation methods courses through the ICA here in the UK, and I love running those training courses. And by far, the most common question I get on those training courses is some version of, "what do you do when it all goes wrong?" What do you do when things go pear-shaped? So that thing that you saw at the IAF was really a development from my set of answers to that question. ...
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    30 min
  • FS83 - Facilitation as a super skill with Robert Cserti

    FS83 - Facilitation as a super skill with Robert Cserti
    Jul 17 2026
    In todays episode Sam is joined by Robert Cserti, who traces his path from a single transformative team building workshop nearly 20 years ago to co-founding SessionLab in 2013 as a side project (built during evenings and weekends while he consulted and his co-founder did a PhD) that grew into a company helping facilitators design and deliver better workshops. The conversation centers on facilitation's rising status from a "soft skill" to a strategic, organisation-wide capability tied to empowerment and employee engagement and on Robert's own philosophy of intentional process design, handling reluctant groups, and the blurry line between being a facilitator and being a participant/stakeholder in the room. They talk about: Facilitation is becoming a "super skill." Organizations increasingly treat it as a core leadership and organisational competency, not just a nice-to-have for running meetings.Empowerment is the underlying goal. Good facilitation creates participative environments where people feel heard and have real input into decisions this is a cultural shift, not a one-off event.Scaling facilitation takes infrastructure. Beyond training individuals, organisations need central "facilitation hubs," shared tools/templates, and a critical mass of skilled people. Passion and "the fun-dar" sustain long, hard build processes. Both Robert and Sam agree that enjoying the work is what carries you through the grind of building something over yearsHandling unwilling participants requires listening first. When a group doesn't want to be there, the fix is giving them space to voice frustrations, then collectively finding the overlap between the sponsor's goals and the group's actual concerns. Quote highlights "I'm seeing that it's becoming one of the future super skills at workplaces that if you can facilitate as a manager, as a leader as a team member, it just opens so many doors for you because you can actually help teams to work effectively and achieve their goals." "We were organising a large event and a person came who was called a trainer and then a lot later I understand that what actually we had was not training. it was pure process facilitation to help our team align and really understand each other better, build bonds, flesh out potential friction points and build trust while we did hands-on work together." Links Todays guest: Robert Cserti - Co-Founder SessionLab https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertcserti/ https://www.sessionlab.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/trainedon/posts/?feedView=all https://www.instagram.com/sessionlab/ https://www.youtube.com/@TrainedOn Todays host: Sam Moon: Community Facilitator. Director of Sam Moon Facilitation Ltd www.linkedin.com/in/theboymoon123 To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF England & Wales Chapter: 🎧 https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/ 📧 podcast@iaf-ew.co.uk 🌐https://iaf-members.org/site/chapters/england-wales Sam: Hello, and welcome to Facilitation Stories, the community podcast of the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as the IAF. My name is Sam Moon, and my guest today is Robert Cserti. Co-founder of SessionLab, Robert's first encounter with facilitation happened nearly two decades ago, where he was deeply inspired by how powerful a well-designed and facilitated workshop can be to shift the way people think and work together. Over the next few years, that hands-on experience as a facilitator planted the seed for SessionLab. Robert found himself running into the same frustrations. The tools available just don't support the real creative and logistical work behind designing great sessions. So in 2013, he and his co-founder, Philip Kish started building something better. For several years, it's a side project which eventually turned into a full business to help individual facilitators design better workshops and organizations scale facilitation and so much more that I'm sure we're likely to noodle on today. So welcome, Robert, and to get us started and add your own flavour to my introduction, what in your world of facilitation is making you smile? Robert: First of all, thanks so much for that intro Sam, its a pleasure to be here Sam: welcome. Great for you to be here. Robert: And so what is making me smile in the world of facilitation? I think what is really nice to see is that facilitation as a skill is getting more recognized in all sorts and sizes of organisations. And my background is that I started as a facilitator and then as you mentioned we saw a need how we could help facilitators. And then if I look back especially as we've worked with a bunch of facilitators at Session Lab, is that more and more large companies as well recognise that facilitation is an important skill to invest in as, and not just as a personal skill, but as an organizational skill. So, with all the rapid transformation that happens at workplaces with AI changing how various jobs are...
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    25 min
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