For Consultants and Trainers

These ideas are for consultants and trainers that want to develop people or organisations.

  • A gentle introduction to cocounselling

    This short event gives a gentle introduction to the profound theory and practice of cocounselling.

  • A simple planning template for events

    Here is a simple planning template for the design of events. it helps you think how to run them and is very useful if more than one person is doing this.

  • Accelerating Learning

    Infants learn much faster than adults do. What can we do to recover these abilities and help others do the same?

  • Action learning based support group

    This describes the process and outcomes of small support groups for Directors from different organisations.

  • Appreciation

    Appreciation costs nothing and can be transform organisations.

  • Appreciations Exercise

    This is a simple way to end a workshop. Everyone leaves feeling positive about themselves and has something to treasure.

  • Appreciative Conference Session

    This helped people powerfully develop their team working, learning and customer service.

  • Appropriate and inappropriate help

    This exercise will help you think about how to help other people. This is not always easy as not all "Help" is helpful. You can use it in a small group or one to one.

  • Appropriate and inappropriate help – Comments

    This talks about five ways of helping people and when they are helpful. Read this after doing the "Appropriate and Inappropriate Help", exercise.

  • Attention!

    Every interaction in organisations, and life, works better when people pay attention to each other.

  • Best Practice in Facilitating Groups

    This gives a simple process to help professionals share their best practice and learn from each other. It uses facilitating skills as an example but is applicable much more widely.

  • Building Effective Relationships that Work

    This describes what we can do that will build relationships that work and what to avoid. These principles are universal and apply in and out of work.

  • Building understanding between groups

    This design helped three different groups working in education understand and appreciate each other better.

  • Career Development Workshop

    This helps people help each other think about what they want to do and go about looking for a new job. It is backed by a series of handouts.

  • Career Development Workshop – Handouts

    This lists the handouts and other resources that support the Career Development workshops

  • Change course for Couples

    This course helps couples, affected by an office relocation, cope positively with the change.

  • Chinese Puzzle

    This is a very simple, quick and enjoyable exercise that can help people in a group get closer and take a few more risks.

  • Coconsulting – a basic structure

    One simple structured way to do cooconsulting

  • Coconsulting – a neat way to become a better consultant and get and give some help!

    Coconsulting is the simplest process for two people to exchange help with each other effectively. The article shows you how to use it to develop yourself and others.

  • Coconsulting – summary

    Coconsulting is the simplest process for two people to exchange help with each other effectively. This article is a brief description of how to do it.

  • Cocounselling

    Cocounselling is a simple and profound approach to improving human functioning. You take turns listening to each other.

  • Counselling skills

    The article describes the skills required to help the other person, the client, help him/her self. It also explains how counselling works.

  • Creativity, thinking and listening

    Listening to others is often the most effective thing you can do to develop their thinking and creativity.

  • Cultural Awareness Exercise

    This simple activity helps people understand and value their own and others' cultures. They also appreciate that they can learn from each other.

  • Customer Care Workshop

    This workshop helped a team in Local Government develop their strategy for improving customer care in their Council. They also learned to value each other and how to work well together.

  • Design of Learning Events

    This describes the principles that lead to effective learning events such as away days or courses. It also gives two designs that how these principles were applied in practice.

  • Developing everybody

    Everybody has more untapped talent. This article gives some ways to develop everybody.

  • Evaluation of Training

    This discusses several ways to evaluate the business benefits of developmental training. All will give valuable insights but none give rigorous proof.

  • Experience transfer

    The transfer process involves the learner integrating into their experience 'missing' pieces from the teacher's experience (mental map) which make sense to the learner.

  • Fun and learning

    We are very good at learning and, if the circumstances are right find, it both fun and rewarding. This gives some simple ideas about how to make learning fun.

  • Getting good information by interview

    How to use interviews with staff to get useful ideas for improvement.

  • Influencing Skills

    These are the vital skills we all need to gain the co-operation of others in the long term.

  • Influencing Skills Course

    This is an example of a two-day version of this course. It helps people use a model of influencing and practice it in role-plays that the participants design themselves.

  • Influencing Skills Homework

    These questions, models and exercises will help people prepare for an influencing skills course or anyone think about their influencing of others.

  • Intercultural Understanding

    These exercises were very effective at building intercultural understanding in the context of a short course.

  • Intervening in Organisations

    This describes briefly things you can do to help individuals, teams and interfaces between teams and organisations become more effective.

  • Lifeline

    Use this to help someone think about his/her life and the peak experiences that give it meaning. The exercise can be very useful to build a group or team when people want to build trust and mutual understanding.

  • Managers managing people

    This shows how to help managers be more interested and active in managing and developing their people.

  • Mentoring to develop staff

    A mentor helps a less experienced person grow to become more effective now and in the future. This note describes the five roles that a mentor may play and gives one way to set up a mentoring service.

  • Name game

    This helps people learn each other's names in a light-hearted and unexpectedly effective way. It also helps to beak the ice and create a learning climate

  • Network Education

    This shows a simple way to create a learning community. The range of skills and topics covered is remarkable. This work was done in North London in the eighties before computers were easily available.

  • Open Systems Planning

    Open systems is a simple and powerful method for developing any system from an individual to an organisation. It can also be used for strategic planning and problem solving.

  • Presentation skills transformed in half an hour

    This is an extremely quick and powerful way to transform presentation skills by dealing with the fear of making a presentation directly

  • Role Negotiation

    Role negotiation is a process for clarifying others' expectations of you and vice versa.

  • Role of the District Manager

    The District Managers looked after a group of stores. Their remit was rather vague so they needed to think from first principles about how to add value.

  • Rules of thumb for change agents

    This is a classic article by Herb Shepard. It gives some powerful and clear thoughts about how to get change to happen effectively

  • Running groups at work

    Simple things you can do that help groups run smoothly

  • Spirit and development

    This discusses how to grow the spirit of an organisation, team or individual using practical methods.

  • Spoons – a lateral thinking game

    This brief game or exercise is a useful energiser. It also helps people laugh and challenges them to think laterally.

  • Strategy Development Workshop

    This short workshop helps people appreciate the strengths of their organisation, build an attractive shared vision and decide how to achieve it.

  • Stress at Work

    This describes the costs of stress and work and some things that people at work can do to reduce stress for themselves and others.

  • Support Group

    A simple way to run a group where everyone get's heard and develops their thinking and confidence.

  • Systematic Approach

    Coverdale training created this powerful model by observing what successful groups of people did when they were engaged in tasks.

  • Team Briefing

    This design can create much more participation and two way communication than the conventional approach.

  • Team Building exercise using Lego

    This is an enjoyable, practical exercise with potential for learning about using resources, listening, assumptions, learning from experience and creative thinking.

  • Techniques for working in groups

    This describes some effective techniques for helping people in a group work better together.

  • Tick Tock!

    This is a simple energiser that you can use in a course or workshop to produce some laughter and relaxation.

  • Time management – an effective tool for management development

    This shows how workshops on time management were able to change the culture of a company and the attitudes and behaviour of it's managers.

  • Training Needs Analysis

    This outlines one way to find training needs that will help the organisation or business develop.

  • Understanding and improving any relationship

    This note describes "Seven-column Analysis" which is a powerful analytical tool for understanding and developing any relationship.

  • Using Pictures

    Use "Pictures" when an individual or a small team needs to think about where they are going and are looking for a direction in work, life or through a specific problem.

  • Working in groups

    A group is usually working on a task, managing a process and dealing with members' feelings all at once. The note gives guidance on how anyone can help a group become more rewarding and effective.