28th Singapore Facilitators' Forum

Journey to the Centre of Professional Facilitation

Date: 14 Mar 09, Saturday

Time: 8:30am – 1:00pm

Place: Focus Conference Room, #15-08, Sim Lim TOWERS, 10 Jalan Besar,
Singapore 208787 (This is NOT Sim Lim Square!)

For directions, please checkout the map of the venue:
http://sg.pagenation.com/sin/Sim%20Lim%20Tower_103.8545_1.3037.map

Rates

Normal registration 1 week before forum date or earlier

Full-time tertiary students S$5.00
Others : S$10

Rates After Registration Deadline

Full-time tertiary students : S$15
Others : S$15

If you are unable to register on-line (for genuine cases of technical
challenges encountered at website), please email our Forum
Administrator - Ms. Emily Ng at emilyng_fns@yahoo.com.sg for
assistance.

Fee is payable at the door. Once registered, the forum fee would be
payable regardless of actual attendance due to our venue booking &
catering commitment. Cancellation or withdrawal is not permitted. We
welcome replacement.

Agenda

8:30 am - Arrivals & Registration
9:00 am - Part 1 – The Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF)
Journey / CPF Competencies Learning
10:30 am - Tea Break & Networking
11:00 am - Part 2 – CPF Competencies Learning Continued
12:30 pm - Special Announcements
12:40 pm - Closing Circle
1:00pm - End of Session

About the Session

Facilitation is gaining rapid recognition as a world-wide profession
that plays a key role in engaging stakeholders in jointly shaping the
world we live in. Whether for businesses, governments, and
communities, facilitation is the invisible hand that helps connect
the people in an organisation to its vision and brings about
sustainable actions and results.

How then does one assess the competencies of the facilitator required
for the job? The certification of professional facilitators by
International Association of Facilitation (IAF) is based on a set of
core competencies required for skillful facilitation. Join us on a
discovery journey this Saturday morning to find out how you too can
become certified professional facilitator by learning from the
experiences of those who have made it!

Participants Will Learn

* 6 key competencies of a IAF-CPF
* The Facilitation Certification Process

The Facilitators

7 CPFs and the 1st Singapore's CPF assessor will be sharing with you
their wisdom and they include:

Ng Choon Seng, CPF and CPF assessor.
Jeff Pan, CPF
Jivarani, CPF
Lee Seng Teck, CPF
Chris Holmes, CPF
Lim Hock Ming, CPF
Lim Hongli, CPF

Register at http://www.fns.sg

If you have enquiries, please email our Forum Administrator - Ms.
Emily Ng at emilyng_fns@yahoo.com.sg

Power of Questions Workshop

Keen to enhance your power of questioning?

Why not experience the Power of Questions Workshop?

This workshop is for you if you want to:

• Understand the nature and power of questions
• Know why we do not ask enough questions
• Know what is hindering us from asking questions
• Know what makes a good question
• Know how to ask a good question

Methodology

The workshop employs many adult learning techniques and experiential exercises designed to move individuals to a deeper understanding and application of learning.

Workshop Content

• The nature of Questions
• Forces that hinder us from asking questions
• Discovering Learner and Judger Questions
• Characteristics of a good question
• Creating the questioning mindset
• Questioning Assumptions
• Solving problems through questions

Workshop Details

Date: 6 Apr 09 (Mon)
Time: 830am - 530pm
Venue: YWCA Fort Canning Lodge

Investment

Register by 6 Mar 2009

IAF Members - SGD 240nett
Non-IAF Members - SGD 340nett

Register from 6 Mar 2009 onwards

IAF Members & Non-IAF Members - SGD 440nett

Early birds ends on 6 Mar 09!

For more details and to register on-line, go to http://www.fns.sg

Dynamic Facilitation Workshop

Date: 24 Jun 09 (Wed) to 26 Jun 09 (Fri)

Time: 8.30am-5.30pm

Venue: Orchid Country Club, Singapore

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Facilitators, Teachers, Trainers, Supervisors, Managers, HRD & OD Professionals, Coaches, Consultants, Instructors, Mediators, Therapists, Community Leaders, Change Agents, Practitioners, Scholars, Activists, or Entrepreneurs looking to use the most advanced approaches for thinking together creatively and collaboratively and achieve win/win results.

WHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND?

Participants will learn how to help people to:· achieve breakthroughs on difficult, emotional or "impossible" issues· arrive at unanimous results and decisions· empower people to new levels of capability· build trust, respect, and the spirit of community in a group· grow in personal creativity and capabilityDynamic Facilitation provides a transformational experience!

WHAT PEOPLE IN THE KNOW ARE SAYING

"I found a way to facilitate for monumental change. It took me to a place I never knew existed and made me wonder why I had not already been there." Glenn Floyd, Champion International"

A mind-expanding experience of an alternative approach to group discussion and problem-solving." Carol Chetkovich, Professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government

WHO IS THE WORKSHOP FACILITATOR?

Jim Rough is a consultant, author, speaker and social innovator. He originated Dynamic Facilitation Skills and has been presenting public and private seminars on Dynamic Facilitation since 1990. Jim also originated the Wisdom Council, a new approach to transforming large systems of people. For over twenty years he has been a faculty member of the Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. He is the author of the book, "Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing the Essential Wisdom and Virtue of All the People."

WORKSHOP INVESTMENT

Early Bird Registration (by 31Jan09)

IAF Members S$1,290**

Non IAF Members S$1,590

After Early Bird Deadline (after 31 Jan 09 and by 15 May 09) S$1,790

*Overseas registrants paying by bank draft or TT, please add S$30 for bank charges in Singapore

** IAF membership is US$85/year for developing countries and US$175 for developed countries. Register for membership @ http://www.iaf-world.org/

REGISTRATION PROCESS

Online @ http://www.fns.sg/

Forecast of Events

Please join any of these learning events in Singapore to keep abreast of the developments in Facilitation, Organisational Transformation, & Personal Growth:

1. Forums: bi-monthly...visit www.fns.sg
2. Foundational Facilitation Workshop (FFW): monthly... visit www.fns.sg
3. The World Café & Open Space Technology: watch this space for details later
4. The Four Rooms Of Change: watch this space for details later
5. Dynamic Facilitation Workshop: 24-26 Jun'09
6. Flipchart Graphics: 24 Jul'09
7. Flavours Of Facilitation - Debriefing, Storytelling, & Rapid Learning: 29 May'09
8. Facilitative Project Management: watch this space for details later
9. Facilitating Using Your Strengths: watch this space for details later
10. Power Of Questions: 6 Apr'09
11. The Art Of Facilitating Meetings: 7 Apr'09
12. Facilitative Parenting (Ages 1-12): watch this space for details later
13. Facilitative Parenting (Ages 13-18): watch this space for details later
14. Singapore Facilitators Conference (SFC): 5 & 6 Nov'09

...and many more...watch this space for details later this year...

Organised by: Facilitators Network Singapore

27th Facilitator's Network Gathering

Date: 10 Jan 09, Saturday
Time: 8:30am – 1:00pm
Place: Focus Conference Room, #15-08, Sim Lim Towers, 10 Jalan Besar, Singapore 208787 (This is NOT Sim Lim Square!)

If you require directions, please log onto the following website to download the map of the venue. http://sg.pagenation.com/sin/Sim%20Lim%20Tower_103.8545_1.3037.map

Rates
(Normal registration 1 week before forum date or earlier)

Full-time tertiary students S$5.00
Others : S$10

Rates After Registration Deadline

Full-time tertiary students : S$15
Others : S$15

If you are unable to register on-line (we only entertain genuine cases of challenges encountered at website!), please email our Forum administrator - Ms. Emily Ng at emilyng_fns@yahoo.com.sg for assistance.

Fee is payable at the door. Once registered, the forum fee would be payable regardless of actual attendance. Cancellation or withdrawal is not permitted. We welcome replacement.

Agenda

8:30 am - Arrivals & Registration
9:00 am - Part 1 – Enhancing Your Image
10:30 am - Tea Break & Networking
11:00 am - Part 2 – Continue on Enhancing Your Image
12:30 pm - Special Announcements
12:40 pm - Closing Circle
1:00pm - End of Session

About the Session

Does image matter?

It most certainly does!

Research has shown that the impact we made on people we come into contact with, depends 55% on how we look and behave, 38% on how we speak and only 7% on what we say. And from the corporate point of view, company image is closely linked with the image of the people behind the company as they are often the first point of contact.

By ensuring that the staff project the right image and create a favorable first impression on clients and business associates.Image isn't just about wearing the right clothes or having impeccable manners. It's about nurturing the right attitude and mindset. It's about how we communicate and relate to others. It's a whole package that we have to work on if we want to impress people we meet and work with.

Participants Will Learn

• How to make use of their current assets so they can look good, feel great all the time
• How to dress to impress by understanding their own body shape
• About The 5 ways to make a brilliant first impression without having to spend a lot of money
• What are the image enhancers, and image destroyers

The Facilitator

Ms Jessica See is a professional Image Consultant and Coach from the Image International PTE LTD. She has conducted numerous coaching sessions including Enhancing Your Image, Personal Branding, and Business Etiquette courses at Inage International. Ms Jessica also conducts one to one coaching for her clients.

If you have enquiries, please email our Forum Administrator - Ms. Emily Ng at emilyng_fns@yahoo.com.sg

What is a quality facilitation process?

Read this Before You Buy a Facilitation Process

I have been asked many times about the quality of a facilitation process. Whether they should invest time and effort to learn it and bring it into their organisation. I understand why such a question has been asked. I have learnt that many HR practitioners have wasted large amount of time, effort and money to learn and implement a particular facilitation process only to find later, and after all the hypes, that it is too complicated to conduct and too difficult to generate the intended outcomes.

To these questions, I suggest three tests to determine the quality of a facilitation process:

• Predictability Test. Here we want to test if a facilitation process produces the outcomes as promised by those who marketed the process to us. So, if a facilitator says that the ORID approach will help the participants reach a decision on what they want to do when they are back in the office the following day, the approach must deliver this outcome at the end of the ORID session. It is important that our participants’ feedback and evaluation forms contain questions or statements that collect this type of data.

• Stability Test. A facilitation process that requires very little design intervention by the facilitator is a stable process. The more effort a facilitator needs to make modifications and adjustments to the process on-the-go usually means that the process may not be universally applicable to all types of occasions or situations as pitched by the service provider. Under such a situation, even if the outcome is predictable, the process has been manipulated and instrumented to create it, which suggests that the process is not stable at all. If we like the process, its use should be limited to its intended purpose.

• Replicability Test. In order that the process gets to permeate the organisation, it has to be localised and replicated by people in the organisation other than those who sold the process to us. However, we tend to learn the science of the process but seldom the art of using the process. In science, we learn about the stages in the process. This is easy. The tough part is the art of using it. Questions about when to move the participants forward in their conversation and how to summaries the conversation is usually not taught. These missing components are causing the difficulties HR practitioners face in conducting and generating the intended outcome from their investments. If our service provider is the only person capable of running the process, this means that the process cannot be replicated by someone else.

When a facilitation process meets these three criteria, they tend to be good processes because they are simple, direct and without the frills found in all those sophisticate processes found out there in the market. So, don’t let all those hype and marketing talk confuse you.

Here is a posting on the IAF Forum on doctoral and Masters research on group facilitation that you may be interested in:
http://www.iaf-forum.org/showthread.php?p=3615#post3615

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 22 Dec 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Inter-faith or Inter-religious Facilitation

To all FFW Alumni,

Here is a message from Ms Michelle Garred, which you maybe interested in.

'Do you have a background in inter-faith or inter-religious engagement?

My colleagues in the Harmony Centre at An-Nahdhah have been working to develop a core group of inter-faith practitioners. They foresee a possible need for expert facilitation support in participatory future visioning process, or other related activities.

If you have experience in inter-faith engagement, and an interest to pursue it further, please send me a response with some brief info about your background.'

Michelle's contact information is below:

Michelle Garred
PhD Candidate
Richardson Institute for Peace Studies
Lancaster University Visiting Affiliate
Asia Research Institute
National University of Singapore
Singapore phone: +65-8151-3043.
USA voice mail: +1-360-566-2455.
Philippines SMS: +63-928-482-1635.
Skype: mgarred.