Lesley is an experienced facilitator who has completed basic and advanced training at the Edward Lowe Foundation. She has been facilitating leadership team, board governance, strategic planning retreats and executive roundtables for many years.

*Contact Lesley to discuss what a customized program might look like for your organization.

Retreats

Retreats can be more engaging and productive when you use an outside facilitator. Lesley works with you and your stakeholders to develop the agenda and process to stimulate expansive thinking and creative, achievable goals. This enables the internal leaders and their teams to fully participate in the process.

Recently, Lesley completed an intensive training program to deliver highly engaged virtual facilitation. This enables her to bring the best of her on-site programs to the virtual setting which in some ways, increases the opportunities for everyone to participate fully in the discussion. She uses a variety of approaches – large group and small group breakouts – to accommodate diverse learning and participation. This allows the entire process to be extremely effective and achieve positive results.

Lesley grounds the retreat planning and delivery process in principles of Appreciative Inquiry (A.I.) – an inquiry driven, strengths-based, whole system approach for bringing about positive systemic change and outcomes. AI is a proven process for promoting a means to inspire new thinking on how to achieve an organization’s highest potential, while retaining what has worked well throughout its history.

The core factors that make AI effective are:

• The use of positive questions to generate meaningful conversations around shared purpose, vision and actions.
• A shift in mindset from a deficit based, negative way of thinking about what isn’t working to a positive and possibility mindset where focus is on strengths from the past, the present and a vision for the future; and
• A shift in the structure of conversations. It expands the participants in the conversation to include the whole system – a microcosm of key stakeholders – by breaking down silos and top-down management approaches and trusting the wisdom and perspectives that diversity brings to the table.

AI facilitation taps into the collective intelligence of an organization to help advance aspirations and goals and/or solve any challenge with unprecedented speed and high levels of engagement. It will unlock newfound capacity, creativity and innovative outcomes that will inspire employee and key stakeholder commitment and bring about a heightened sense of connection and collaboration.