Effective business meetings refers to the designing, preparing, and running of a productive and impartial meeting. Skillful process facilitation is key in new product development teams, complex problem solving, business negotiations, organizational development, and in consensus decision-making. If well done, it makes the difference between run-of-the-mill results and breakthroughs.

A skillful facilitator does not lead the participants of a meeting, nor does he or she try to distract or to entertain. Also, the facilitator is neither the most powerful person in the room, nor the one with the most expertise. The facilitator is never manipulative, which would be seen as unethical. Rather, he or she is like a pilot helping the participants to navigate the rough waters of power differences, conflicting perspectives, uncertainty, and time pressure to reach generative and promising results.

Meeting skills are becoming increasingly important for business managers, since increasingly complex problems require teams to pool their expertise, and then to stretch beyond what they know to achieve new and unusual solutions. In this seminar you will learn to design and prepare such facilitated meetings, to set a challenging agenda, to become attentive to group norms, and to work with unfolding group dynamics.

It includes, but is not restricted to agenda setting, practical arrangements, location and layout of the room, stakeholder mapping, techniques for how to build a group, techniques for how to achieve a generative group atmosphere, how to handle provocative interventions, holding alternative courses of action, awareness of verbal and non-verbal undercurrents, and achieving closure.

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