Courses

Courses at a glance

Sacramento Professional Facilitators is proud to present a variety of stimulating courses to enrich your skills. We specialize in imparting a unique method of facilitation called the Technology of Participation (ToP)®. We combine high quality materials with professional instruction to deliver the best value to you and your organization.

We emphasize skills, application, and reinforcement so that our customers leave a seminar with knowledge and skills that they can put into practice immediately. Our programs are integrated into your organization’s business approach so that your employees see how the training relates to their work environment.

Below are course highlights. Click on the course name to read more. Register by selecting the course and date from the course calendar at right.

ToP Facilitation Methods - Leadership Edition

Learn three proven ways to activate group participation – the focused conversation, consensus workshop, and action planning. All can be used alone or creatively combined. Hands-on practice helps you discover practical uses in your life and work.

ToP Facilitation Methods: Leadership Online Intensive

This comprehensive three week, 9-module course provides an intensive pathway to applying ToP Facilitation Methods, whether face-to-face or online. This unique format, developed for online delivery and facilitation, is for individuals who want training that includes both an understanding of these methods alongside hands on experience with ToP Methods in order to deepen their capacity and confidence to use them in their work.

ToP Strategic Planning

The ToP strategic Planning process builds on your learning form the ToP Facilitation methods course, showing you how to weave those methods into an integrated approach to strategic planning. The resulting plan is realistic, achievable, and easy to monitor.

ToP Strategic Planning Online

Translating the ToP Strategic Planning process to an online format, ToP Strategic Planning – Online Edition preserves the richness of the face to face version and moves it into the virtual world. Highly participatory, the Online Edition breaks down barriers and builds engagement wherever you may be.

Accelerated Action Planning Online

Accelerated Action Plan Online is designed for engaging small teams in creating action plans online. Through this process, teams of 10 or fewer, use predesigned templates that guide the participatory process in creating the plan and coordinating their efforts. Class participants are given a set of templates following the class. AAP is best suited to small projects that can be implemented in less that six months.

Top Secrets of Implementation

Do your clients have difficulties sustaining a plan once it has been initiated? Do you sometimes have difficulties helping your clients stay on track, bring new people into a team and bring closure? This course is about keeping plans and projects alive, relevant, doable and achievable. There is a large and powerful component for peer mentoring in this course.

Top Secrets of Implementation Online

Our plans were designed in a pre-COVID world. This course presents a process and useful tools to re-strategize for new situations. Participants learn to explore ways to meet deliverables in a virtual environment, bring new partners to the table mid-stream, and stay participatory and collaborative through virtual communication.

Accelerated Action Planning

Energize and align your team toward a common goal in the time it takes to have a regular staff meeting. Learn all the practical details that ensure a successful project. This process is especially useful for small teams of 4 – 10 members who are planning an event or project within the next few months

Approaches to Environmental Scanning

Before preparing an organization’s plans, the team needs to understand the history and current dilemmas, as well as anticipate trends. Environmental scanning provides a way to quickly tap into relevant factual data and customer, staff or community perceptions.

Facilitation for Innovation: Inspiring Group Creativity

Expand your skills to facilitate group creativity, innovation and strategic thinking. Experience exercises and receive a reference book of tools and resources that help a group limber up thinking, see a problem from many perspectives and find pathways for action.

Facilitation Graphics

Words communicate symbolically. Words married to visuals communicate more deeply and dramatically. There is a power in the visual – it shapes experience, refreshes, enlivens and deepens communication. Engage hands on in exploring materials, techniques and processes for developing a graphics library, organizing information visually and creating templates to use with your groups.

Making Data Dance

Unlike “experts” collecting and analyzing data and then feeding it to participants, this course looks at participatory processes for data gathering and analysis. This course explores three real case studies of participatory data review that use Focused Conversation and Consensus Workshop methods taught in the ToP Facilitation Methods course.

Meetings That Work

In today’s world of truncated timelines, increased workloads and demands for workplace democracy, we need group decisions made quickly, positively and with diminished frustration. We also need to ensure that meetings are effective, efficient and highly productive. This course is designed for the person who needs tools to enhance participation and productivity in various types of meetings. The course has extensive reference material on various tools and facilitation methods.

Designing for Change

Individuals, groups, and organizations sometimes need to rethink and adjust to the current reality. The Power of Image Shift course helps you to thoroughly understand the complexity and depth required in transformational change. This course provides tools to design facilitation or training sessions that result in effective change.

Social Process Triangles

The Social Process triangles provide a well-tested approach to analyzing the current reality for organizations and communities. For those working in local communities, businesses, government, issue campaigns, social networks, faith-based groups – both volunteers and public servants alike, the triangles can provide a simple and transparent tool for assessing and working with the dynamics of the situation.

ToP Focused Conversation Method

A ToP Focused Conversation is a facilitated group conversation that promotes inclusive and meaningful conversation through four structured phases of reflection: from the simple to more complex aspects of an issue. The process enables people to engage in a conversation of honest discovery where one speaks, listens to differing views, develops new understanding and perhaps even different perspectives through the process.

Radical Collaboration

Organizations running complex projects or relying on high levels of interdependency among employees require greater collaborative skills in order to perform well. Organizations live or die on collaborative relationships. For individuals, collaborative relationships can make or break their career.

ToP Facilitation Methods - Leadership Edition
- September 18, 2024 - September 20, 2024
  8:30 am - 5:00 pm
A sister to our flagship facilitation course, this extended three-day version highlights the role of the facilitative leader and offers additional practice opportunities in a more relaxed environment.
TFM Leadership - Online Intensive
- TFM Leadership - Online Intensive
  October 7, 2024 - November 15, 2024
  8:30 am - 11:00 am
Learn participatory methods that enable groups to achieve shared understanding, build consensus on ways to move forward and create plans that result in committed action…
Accelerated Action Planning Online
- October 25, 2024
  8:30 am - 2:30 pm
Learn to energize and align your team to successfully plan a project or event in a matter of hours, in an online environment. The fast…
ToP Strategic Planning Online
- ToP Strategic Planning
  November 4, 2024 - November 8, 2024
  8:30 am - 12:00 pm
Weave the powerful ToP Facilitation Methods into an integrated approach to strategic planning for a plan that is realistic, achievable, and easy to monitor. Using…
ToP Secrets of Implementation Online
- ToP Secrets of Implementation Online
  December 11, 2024 - December 12, 2024
  8:30 am - 4:30 pm
Sustaining a plan, once it has been implemented, can be challenging. Staying on track is difficult, especially when new people are introduced after the plan…
Radical Collaboration
- January 28, 2025 - January 30, 2025
  9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Radical Collaboration is a highly engaging program focused on five core collaboration skills including mindset, soft skills and a toolbox that individuals and teams need to…
ToP Strategic Planning Online
- ToP Strategic Planning
  May 5, 2025 - May 9, 2025
  8:30 am - 12:00 pm
Weave the powerful ToP Facilitation Methods into an integrated approach to strategic planning for a plan that is realistic, achievable, and easy to monitor. Using…
ToP Strategic Planning Online
- ToP Strategic Planning
  November 17, 2025 - November 21, 2025
  8:30 am - 12:00 pm
Weave the powerful ToP Facilitation Methods into an integrated approach to strategic planning for a plan that is realistic, achievable, and easy to monitor. Using…