Facilitation and Organisation:

Improving Communication, Getting Results

Scanteam has facilitated workshops and seminars in Norway and around the world. These have ranged from assisting an organisation to review and modify its internal strategy, to broad-based national workshops debating development strategies of national governments.

Facilitation is demanding, as it requires understanding the interests and conflicts among the stakeholders, helping them keep an eye on the objectives of the exercise at hand, and then ensuring that they come to closure--preferably with clear and agreed targets and action plans.

Our role as facilitator is to ensure that the process follows a logical and transparent path that all are comfortable with. We often use RBM-techniques since these are both highly participatory, yet objectives-and target-oriented. This ensures that stakeholders see the relations between their goals, the activities required to produce them, the resources available for them, can identify the indicators to measure progress and the factors (risks) that may hinder them.

Scanteam partners have carried out facilitation tasks in Norwegian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Russian.

National Development Fund

Scanteam facilitated a two-day workshop for all 45 employees of a National Community Development Fund shortly after its establishment. The workshop reviewed the organisational set-up and all management instruments, looking at how the different units should share information and work together. The workshop ended with an agreed action plan for follow up and improvements.

The comments from the participants were clear: "We have achieved in two days what we have been struggling with for several months"..