Valerie is an agile and change coach and consultant, a self confessed agile geek, who loves finding new ways of bringing agile practices and learning into the workplace and bringing a new energy to staff. She brings strong facilitation skills, with a focus on equal voice and and a passion for diversity of thought. She strives for the best outcome and believes strongly in sustainable, incremental change. This creates consistency, reliability and dependability within organisations and, ultimately, for their customers and users. She has roots in scrummastery and agile ways of working at a team level, but has grown to help wider organisations adopt more agile ways of thinking and working, encouraging and influencing more effective discovering, planning and delivery processes, involving increased communication between all levels and stakeholders and a focus on delivering value quickly.
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Triz, W3izz and Wicked Questions
We invite you to think about your favourite meeting, that one where you were excited to go, felt engaged, valued and equal to the others there. The one that explored important issues in depth and came up with real paths forward - and a plan to make it happen.
Are you struggling to remember this meeting? Or maybe this doesn’t sound like something that COULD happen - a pipe dream if you like. Join us to find practical ways to make every meeting, your favourite meeting, using Liberating Structures.
Every day at work, we have interactions with other people. Sometimes in a scheduled meeting, and if we are lucky we still get the opportunity for spontaneous interactions with others. Many of our calendars are full of meetings - but how many of those do you look forward to or take value from?
Traditional meeting structures include an agenda, a chairperson, a few key voices speaking, many others quiet, little opportunity - aside from the ‘Any Other Business’ at the end - to raise your points or questions (when everyone is itching to leave, or go to the next meeting). They stifle inclusion, engagement and open discussion - but are all too common in modern workplaces. Sometimes this is warranted - often it’s not.
But that can all change. We will introduce you to the world of Liberating Structures - a set of simple facilitation tools for meetings or gatherings of people which can revolutionise your interactions and time together. From a simple 15 minute energiser, or finding alignment on key messages to a mix of structures that can take participants through a journey together, there is something in the Liberating Structures toolbox for every type of meeting and every group context.
The structures have been created and curated to focus on interaction, giving everyone an invitation to participate in meetings and an equal opportunity to engage and have their voice heard.
Key takeaways…
In this workshop, we will share with you how to:
- Choose a Liberating Structure that fits your group's context.
- Make your meetings more open, equal and engaging.
- Run some of the Structures in the Library.
- Adapt some of the structures for use online or in person.