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 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 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.
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.
Virtual Facilitation Online
Productive, virtual teams deliver results on time and on budget. Learn to facilitate engaging virtual meetings, where participants exchange ideas, manage projects and solve problems. This course was designed as an online learning lab for those who want to focus on learning to make meeting and events collaborative, participatory and engaging. Learn to use the ToP Focused Conversation method in virtual meetings.
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.