Virtual Course
Master the craft of leading collaboration.
Facilitating Collaborative Innovation
About This Opportunity
Whether you're convening multi-stakeholder collaborations, leading your own team, or participating in someone else's meeting, the ability to guide groups through complexity is essential leadership capacity. This highly experiential workshop builds your skills in planning, leading, and even recovering meetings where diverse groups navigate confusion, conflict, and uncertainty together. You'll learn the complete meeting cycle and practice facilitation moves that transform stuck conversations into forward momentum—capabilities that strengthen your effectiveness in any role where humans are working together.
Who Should Join
This course is ideal for leaders, facilitators, and team members ready to strengthen their craft. Ideal if you're facilitating collaborative groups and want to move beyond "managing discussion" to genuinely shaping collective intelligence. Equally valuable if you lead an intact team and want to create more productive meetings, or if you participate in meetings and want to help guide conversations in constructive directions. Especially useful if you've experienced analysis paralysis, circular conversations, or groups that struggle to move from insight to action.
What You’ll Gain
Through mini-lectures, live demonstrations, and hands-on practice with real facilitation challenges, you'll develop the skills to guide groups through the messiness of collaborative work.
The Meeting Cycle: Learn to see meetings as connected moments in a larger arc. You'll build competence across all six stages—from intentional planning through powerful follow-up.
Opening with Clarity: Set context that orients participants, establish agreements that shape culture, and create the conditions for productive work before the "real" agenda begins.
Guiding Conversations in Real Time: Practice facilitation moves for common challenges: dominant voices, circular discussions, premature convergence, and groups stuck in analysis. Learn to make process observations that raise awareness without blame.
Creating Accountability and Momentum: Design meetings that produce real work products, not just discussion. Build narrative arcs that sustain energy and commitment across sessions.
Navigating the Leadership-Facilitation Tension: Explore when to step back and hold space and when to step forward and provide direction. Develop your own awareness-based leadership practice.
You'll leave with enhanced skills in:
Planning meetings with clear outcomes and appropriate methods
Opening sessions in ways that build psychological safety and focus
Shaping conversations and supporting focus and direction without dominating
Addressing power dynamics and creating space for all voices
Moving groups from discussion and insight to concrete work products
Building group narrative that sustains momentum over time
Practical Applications
Throughout the workshop, you'll work on facilitation challenges from your own context, leaving with strategies you can apply immediately.
Your Trainers
Additional Information
Not assigned yet.
Not assigned yet.
Join us to build momentum, facilitate collaboration, and achieve groundbreaking solutions together.
If cost poses a barrier to your participation, please contact us.
Facilitating Collaborative Innovation
Facilitating Collaborative Innovation
What You’ll Gain
Through mini-lectures, live demonstrations, and hands-on practice with real facilitation challenges, you'll develop the skills to guide groups through the messiness of collaborative work.
The Meeting Cycle: Learn to see meetings as connected moments in a larger arc. You'll build competence across all six stages—from intentional planning through powerful follow-up.
Opening with Clarity: Set context that orients participants, establish agreements that shape culture, and create the conditions for productive work before the "real" agenda begins.
Guiding Conversations in Real Time: Practice facilitation moves for common challenges: dominant voices, circular discussions, premature convergence, and groups stuck in analysis. Learn to make process observations that raise awareness without blame.
Creating Accountability and Momentum: Design meetings that produce real work products, not just discussion. Build narrative arcs that sustain energy and commitment across sessions.
Navigating the Leadership-Facilitation Tension: Explore when to step back and hold space and when to step forward and provide direction. Develop your own awareness-based leadership practice.
You'll leave with enhanced skills in:
Planning meetings with clear outcomes and appropriate methods
Opening sessions in ways that build psychological safety and focus
Shaping conversations and supporting focus and direction without dominating
Addressing power dynamics and creating space for all voices
Moving groups from discussion and insight to concrete work products
Building group narrative that sustains momentum over time
Practical Applications
Throughout the workshop, you'll work on facilitation challenges from your own context, leaving with strategies you can apply immediately.
Trainers
Not assigned yet.
Join us to build momentum, facilitate collaboration, and achieve groundbreaking solutions together.
What Others Have Said About This Course
Jennifer Johnston
Program Manager Healthcare Workforce & Transition Projects,
Highline College
“The Collaborative Innovation training has served us very well. We followed the process pretty closely and it really reenergized these educators and helped the group work together beautifully and thoughtfully. Speaking for myself, the training had a lasting impact on my thinking and facilitation. Hopefully, we’ll be able to attend another training in the future.”
Courtney Pineau
Senior Director of Climate and Agriculture Networks,
Green America
“I was thoroughly impressed by the content and overall quality of the experience. From the first day of the course, your team did a fantastic job creating a strong sense of cohesion among the
worldwide attendees. We were given numerous opportunities to connect, to learn, and to work together. I was also deeply struck by the intentionality of how the course was presented. The materials and the seamless use of multiple technology platforms made the event one of the most enlivening virtual events/trainings I have attended. Within days of the course’s completion, our team in attendance had already incorporated many of the methods and frameworks.”
Janey Youngblood
California State University, Stanislaus
“This training workshop was well worth every minute of the participants' time. It provided an awareness of what constitutes a well-run meeting from start to finish. From the facilitator's perspective, it provided the planning pathway, the strategies and skills, and observational awareness to optimize the outcome of an effectively conducted meeting. Lessons learned from this training have also made me a better participant in meetings, even outside the role of a facilitator, because I now know how to help guide the discussions in more productive directions when things start to go awry. It is a training that would benefit virtually everyone who interacts in group settings.”
Refund & Cancellation Policy
We understand that sometimes changes in circumstances and availability mean you might no longer be able to attend a training session for which you've registered.
We're ready to work with you to resolve any conflicts, including transferring your registration to another member of your team.
If that's not possible the following cancellation and refund policy will apply to all training course registrations received on or after September 21, 2021.
Cancellations received in advance of 30 days before a workshop will receive a full refund.
Cancellations received less than 30 days but more than 10 days before a workshop will receive a refund of 60%.
Cancellations received less than 10 days before a workshop will not be refunded.
To inquire about transferring your registration or requesting a refund, please contact us.
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Welcoming Guest and Co-Host, Lucinda Garthwaite
Lucinda is the founder and Director of the nonprofit Institute for Liberatory Innovation. The ILI generates innovative solutions to create liberatory environments - where compassion leads to action, curiosity inspires connection, and accountability ensures sustained progress. Their work invites people to think and behave differently, and to align their day-to-day lives more closely with an increasingly thriving, just, and peaceful future.
Prior to founding the ILI in 2019, Lucinda worked in youth-serving organizations; and taught writing and social change at the University of New Hampshire and Goddard College, where she also co-directed the undergraduate program, and served as Academic Dean.
Lucinda holds a Doctorate in Leadership for Change from Fielding University, and is a Fellow of the Fielding Institute for Social Innovation. She also has Masters in Education from the University of New Hampshire, and an MFA in Creative writing from Goddard College. She’s the author of Bumbling Humans: Reflections on Liberatory Change (2023). She posts regularly in the ILI newsletter.
