Holding Space, Making Change. 

Meeting Design & Facilitation

Taking time out of your regular work for a retreat or gathering is a huge investment, and you want it to go well. 

You’re probably also already up to your ears in your existing work. So, finding space to carefully design an agenda that will support your group in achieving your objectives while also nourishing your team's relationships is a tall order.  

It can be overwhelming to think about how to plan and facilitate a meaningful meeting that makes the time, energy, and cost associated with bringing people together, whether in person or over zoom, truly worthwhile. 

This is where I come in as your partner and co-conspirator.

What you can expect from partnering with me

Working together, I will help you get crystal clear on what you are trying to achieve through your convening, and we will co-create an agenda and a process that gets you there in a way that creates a rich experience for every participant. 

Through our partnership, you can trust that we’ll design something that meets your needs, while letting go of worrying about the “how” –that’s my area of expertise! By bringing me in as a facilitator, you can allow yourself to dive into the deep conversations and be fully engaged with your people rather than feeling torn between facilitation and engaging in the conversation.

Ultimately, this means less work for you to do, and more relaxation and participation.  

This offering might be a good fit if:

  • You’re up for doing some front-end high level thinking with me about the purpose of your event (your why) and your outcomes (what you want to see emerge out of it).

  • You’re willing to trust me if I say less is more. Sometimes our eyes are bigger than our plates when it comes to meeting design, and that’s where participants get exhausted or tune out. As an expert in this space, I’m well attuned to calibrating how much we can fit into one gathering.

  • You want to create a meaningful convening that supports participants in having honest conversations, reflecting deeply, and making space for real processing.

This offering might not be the best fit for you if…

  • You are looking for someone to come in and execute your agenda without having deeply engaged on it with you. There's a lot of art and science that goes into agenda design - and if I don’t fully get it, there's a lot that can go wrong during your meeting, especially when things go off-script, which inevitably happens. 

  • You want to be entirely hands off – that also won’t work. To really create a meaningful experience, I need to understand what you’re seeking to get out of your meeting at a deep level. Often, my clients think they know what they want, but realize after we’ve had time to think deeply together that their initial ideas were a bit off.

    Hence the magic of us working together! 

Agenda Design

As a meeting designer, I work with my clients to ensure we’re creating an agenda that doesn’t just tend to the mind, but also tends to the body and the heart. This looks different for every meeting, but includes making space to support relationship building, creating opportunities for participants to literally move their bodies, and other practices that support tapping into our right-brains, where more creative thinking lives. 

I am a collaborator at heart, and to make sure that I’m designing a process that meets your needs, it’s key for us to touch base at key points in the design process to make sure we’re well calibrated, and that my approach is hitting the mark. I’ve learned over the years that real communication and alignment happens when we roll up our sleeves and get into the work together. 

At the outset, I start with a few conversations for deep listening, exploring Purpose and Outcomes for your convening, and getting a lay of the land when it comes to your stakeholders, the context in which you’re operating, and the atmosphere you want to create for your gathering.  We’ll also cover brass tacks like timelines for key milestones, decision-making, and coordinating with stakeholders on your team’s end. 

From there, we’ll schedule a few check-ins to review draft agendas, and discuss any pre-convening exercises or homework that might support your people in showing up primed and ready for the convening.

Facilitation

I am available on a limited basis to facilitate in-person retreats, gatherings and convenings. 

I also have a rich experience of planning and facilitating powerful on-line events, including strategic planning sessions, workshops, debriefs and retreats for groups working remotely. 

Whether we are working in person or through the ethers, I work as a facilitator to: 

  • Accommodate different processing and learning styles (some of us are verbal processors, while others of us need quiet reflection time to make sense of things);

  • Create opportunities for all voices to be heard; 

  • Skillfully navigate areas of tension or divergence by supporting groups to engage in generative debate; 

  • Provide opportunities for participants to move their bodies (nobody wants to be stuck in the same chair for hours on end), and to rest and reset over the course of a meeting so that the experience is invigorating, rather than draining. 

“Vanessa’s facilitation was a skillful masterclass. She excelled at taking big complicated pieces and breaking them down into impact. She helped our global team establish a shared language around planning and strategy for the first time. She challenged us and interrogated our assumptions.”

— Areeba Hamid, Executive Director, Greenpeace UK