Public Sphere

A) Facilitation skills (half-day or 1 day version available)

Facilitating discussions with the public or other stakeholders isn’t easy, yet lots of organisations expect staff to do it with little preparation. What if your participants have too much to say, or too little? What if a few people are dominating, or worse, are making others feel uncomfortable? What if they’re really trying to rattle you? And amongst all this, how can you make sure you’re capturing notes that the report-writer can use and understand? This workshop aims to help anyone likely to find facilitation amongst their duties to feel more confident about what’s involved, learn some tips and tricks for dealing with different situations and to arrive better prepared for their next stint as a facilitator.

B) Involving citizens in policy-making (1 day)

Most public sector organisations have a history of doing research, consultation and engagement to understand what citizens or service users think, want and need, and using this to inform policy-making. But few are as confident in real participatory policy-making and the methods for doing it – such as citizens’ panels, assemblies and co-design processes – and anxieties about purpose, legitimacy and effectiveness abound. Yet when it comes to limited resources, tough decisions and contentious topics, these approaches can be game-changing.

This workshop aims to help senior managers or politicians to understand how greater public participation can help them arrive at better policies, the practical approaches they can use and when best to use them. This could be useful for a team about to embark on developing a new policy or strategy, or for a group of senior managers or politicians interested in exploring how deliberative and participatory approaches could help them collaborate more with citizens, build trust and achieve better results as an organisation.

C) Deliberative methods (2 days)

Including more of the under-pinning theory than Workshop B, this workshop aims to help those in dedicated research, engagement and policy roles to really get to grips with the landscape of deliberative methods being used and developed today. Originally developed for Whitehall civil servants, this would be suitable for a team working at national, regional or local level that wants to strengthen its understanding of the theory and practice around different deliberative methods and their application. As a result they should be more confident in explaining different approaches to colleagues and politicians or commissioning those processes directly.