School of Facilitating
The School of Facilitating stands for flexible, high-quality, individual accompaniment in change processes.
Our vision: sustainable future organizations. On the path towards that vision we put the people and their sphere of activity at the center of our work.
Especially when it comes to agility and transformation, New Work and Next Organization, the Facilitating method makes an essential contribution: It enables people to navigate through the complexity of change with clarity and ease.
As facilitators in German-speaking countries since the 1990s, we have been providing support for organizations of different sizes and industries, as well as teams and individuals. Our special quality also arises from our diversity. Different disciplines ranging from physicist to artist bring in a large repertory of methods, interdisciplinarity and different perspectives.
At the core we live the same mission: to drive change with attitude, keen perception and new perspectives.
THE CORE OF OUR WORK
The Facilitation Approach
While life around us is becoming ever more complex, demands on leaders and staff alike are steadily growing. Gone are the times when one simply planned and managed steps in a process at work. Leadership is now much more a process of adapting to frequent changes and to new influences.
Facilitating is an unconventional and highly effective method, which makes the many duties and tasks leaders perform easier. Facilitating helps to access intuition, expands awareness and builds the bridge between the differences in managing and leading. One’s own attitude develops into an invaluable tool for the challenging times of today’s world.
Facilitation is based on the conviction that everyone in an organization has an “inner picture” of what the future looks like and what needs to be done. How to tap into this treasure chest is the challenge for the leaders today.
Those who have internalized facilitating techniques can establish a culture of leadership based on trust that assigns important roles to everyone involved in a change process. Challenges and uncertainties become positive, energizing forces that aid people in their developing sustainable solutions in their teams and for their processes.
Since its foundation in 2007, the School of Facilitating has been specializing in meeting this challenge and has been training people who strive to activate their underutilized personal resources for following their path more confidently in the future.
Theory U – our guiding principle
The guiding principle of our facilitator work is the Theory U model developed by Claus Otto Scharmer, a sociologist and researcher who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. He studied how change processes were designed in order to ensure successful and sustainable change. He wanted to find out how successful leaders acted in comparison to unsuccessful ones.
Scharmer once said: “In order to access those deeper layers of learning and collective intelligence, leaders need a new ‘social technology’ which can move and tune three instruments: an open mind, an open heart and an open will.”
Based on these and additional insights, Scharmer developed “Theory U” as an approach for considering current changes arising from an emerging future. This approach assists in identifying potential for developing future-oriented, sustainable concepts and allowing it to come or simply letting it come.
Theory U aids in guiding a person or a group through several steps of inner and external awareness. It is an invaluable tool for us – and for training facilitators. The model designs and shapes the path of change and serves as a “guardrail for developing change” during the process. A rapidly increasing number of leaders have come to value Theory U as a guide for their work when change is needed.
AS CHANGE PROCESS FACILITATORS
- In Organizations at all levels we strengthen the skill to act.
- We assist people in identifying their common goals, in shaping the path towards them and in successfully achieving them.
- We help people to share knowledge, to learn from each other, to discover issues together, to make good decisions and to act.
- We ensure that the past is available as a resource of experiences and that the future flows into the process as a resource of possibilities.
- We ensure that people are committed to their processes and take responsibility for their cooperation, their conflicts and successes. We take care to use ease, humor, clarity and reflection. We love common sense.
- We know that changes occurring in organizations also require people to cooperate and to be personally ready for change.
- Change processes are frequently started for strategic reasons or at structural levels of organizations that eventually wander around to reach the personal level of those involved — to their own role, to their own position and to their own change within the process. Part of the process is finding each other again and redefining how people are to cooperate with each other and to reorient themselves to the new alignment within the organization. This process is rarely linear; instead it follows its own laws. To know, to understand and to shape everything involved in such a process is the role of a facilitator.
You can profit from our experience – just contact us: info@school-of-facilitating.de
Coaching
We have been coaching managers and employees in a wide range of areas for many years. Our pragmatic guiding principle is always to enable the people we coach to take a good next step. We work face to face, by video or telco.
The following six principles are important to us:
1: Contract awareness – there is a preliminary discussion with all parties involved and a common target agreement.
2: Goal and solution oriented
3: Contextual reference – close orientation to the context of the coachee including „on the job“ support
4: Value orientation – we always coach considering the values of the client and the coachee.
5: Systemic view – we have the interactions of the systems involved in view, such as customer system, hierarchical system, and system of the coachee.
6: Experience and learning-intensive orientation
FACILITATING TRAININGS
As facilitators, we have not only guided many organizations in their change processes, we have also conducted professional training programs for managers and consultants. Facilitating cannot be acquired by reading about it, it can only be discovered and developed by experiencing it.
The trainings we offer are:
- Facilitating Change: basic course in seven modules
- Advanced Facilitating: extension of basic course in three modules
- In-company trainings on leadership, facilitation and Theory U
- Theory U – digital
- Presentations and workshops
We are also available to guide individual change processes:
Just give us a call at +49 30 32 60 13 66
FACILITATING CHANGE BASIC
In seven training modules, you can acquire the required expertise to design and to lead change and development processes in your company at the structural level as well as at the psychological level. Transparent, meaningful, successful!
Our training modules are designed for managers, human resource personnel, trainers, consultants or anyone who has responsibility for leading people and making decisions.
Managers learn social techniques that make it easier to clarify goals, strategies and visions. For yourself, your team or your customers, you may be able to open up new avenues and find more room for action.
Consultants and coaches use the technique facilitating as a method or a technique for finding clarity or it may be used as a meaningful additional element in guiding change processes.
Based on Theory U and the Facilitating Approach, the School of Facilitating created a training course for developing qualified Facilitators. The training course, Facilitating Change, goes far beyond consulting, coaching and ordinary facilitation approaches commonly used in change processes. The course has been recognized by the European Coaching Association (ECA).
Our Facilitator Basic courses are held either in Berlin, Bern (CH) or near Stuttgart and contain seven modules. Each module starts at noon on Thursdays and ends at noon on Saturdays. The entire training cycle is guided by 3 – 4 of our highly experienced trainers. For each module two trainers are always present and active.
For more information, please contact us: info@school-of-faciliating.de
SCHOOL OF FACILITATING: THE TEAM
The School of Facilitating is a team of trainers and facilitators who continuously develop their approach for initiating and leading change processes. And make this accessible to others.
The school is led by Renate Franke and Barbara Zuber.
Renate Franke
Her life is as moving as her constructive way of dealing with it. For example, she succeeds in grasping people and situations and uses this to develop suitable paths that shape the future. Facilitating is the right attitude for her and Theory U is a wonderful guideline for it.
The central concern of her work is to make people aware of their potential and to motivate them to use it for personal success as well as for the success of the company as a whole.
Freelance trainer, coach, facilitator since 1995. Founder of the School of Facilitating in 2007.
Barbara Zuber
She is a research mind for topics related to the personal development of us humans. Her current focus is on „new thinking: head, heart and hand as one“. For her, facilitating is an important facet in the development of leadership and buildup of resilience.
As a facilitator, it is her central concern to enable people in these challenging times to open up to change and transformation and walk their path of potential. With that they are able to build sustainable systems and organizations.
Freelance coach, trainer and moderator since 1993. Founder of the School of Facilitating in 2007.
The school of facilitating cooperates with partners in Vienna (AUS) and Bern (CH).
- It guides change processes in organizations.
- It offers certified training courses for becoming a facilitator.
- It provides in-company training tailored to your organization.
- It is a think-tank and a knowledge platform for facilitators.
The Attitude Connecting Us as Facilitators
Where we work there are no “teachers and students”, rather an attitude of “with each other”, which we use for identifying potentials and supporting developments for moving forward. No process is ever the same. Everything we have learned and experienced over the past two decades flows into our attitude and contributes to how we approach new projects. We remain curious and love to design and to guide processes because we do not consider ourselves to be theorists rather we understand ourselves to be “crafters” of change.
