Training

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
- Confucius

Learning is at the heart of everything we do at RKP, it is implicitly at the core of all genuine dialogue and is explicitly designed into all our engagement and training activities.

We specialise in:
- Facilitation skills
- Process design, planning and management
- Participatory and collaborative group decision making
- Key concepts in managing uncertainty and reducing conflict

We offer:
- Open programs
- Bespoke training packages

In a new initiative, RKP is now collaborating with Lynn Wetenhall Associates and Hickling & Müller Process Consultants to offer a greater depth and breadth of experience and expertise to our training.

Open Programs

Process Architecture

Over three days this course focuses on the design and management of interactive engagement processes as a whole. Participants are introduced to the underlying principles, methods and tools which are widely used in the field and then given the opportunity to apply them to real projects. The material is drawn from the extensive experience of the trainers, and current professional practice. Over the years this course has proved to be directly applicable to the real world challenges faced by policy creators and project managers in the private, public and voluntary sectors. See our course materials (3Mb).

Workshop Facilitation Skills

This course is for people who want to learn how to design and facilitate workshops and interactive group meetings of all kinds. The style of the three days is highly interactive in nature and the emphasis throughout is on learning by doing. After the underlying principles have been established and some of the core tools and skills have been explored, participants are given numerous opportunities to put them into practice by facilitating the rest of the group though various tasks. All aspects of the course are run in the style of an interactive event, thus participants are able to observe and experience the approach first hand. See our course materials (2Mb).

 

Scheduled Open Courses

• Process Architecture - September 21st to 23rd 2011 - Luvens University, Belgium

• Workshop Facilitation Skills - October 10th to 12th 2011 - Wageningen Business School, The Netherlands

• Process Architecture - November 16th to 18th 2011 - Van Hall Larenstein, University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands

• Process Architecture – March 12th to 14th 2012 - Wageningen Business School, The Netherlands

• Process Architecture - May 23rd to 24th 2012 - The OR Society, Birmingham, UK

• Process Architecture - September 19th to 21st - Luvens University, Belgium

Bespoke Training

Our bespoke packages are designed to meet the specific needs of the client. A bespoke package has several advantages over our open programs. Firstly as they are designed in collaboration with the client they target their needs very precisely. Secondly if the client wants to train more than a handful of staff, bespoke, in-house, training can be more economical than sending the same number of people on an open program. Finally as our courses are intense, exciting and stimulating events they form a strong shared experience among participants and so have a significant team building aspect.

Examples of the bespoke training we have delivered:

• The Environment Agency
Stakeholder Engagement for EA Wales Senior management team.

• Royal Haskoning
Building process awareness and facilitation skills within the company and training their trainers.

• Metropolitan Police
Development and delivery of community partnerships understanding and skills for neighbourhood sergeants, and planning and managing community consultation and engagement

• The Government Service for Land and Water Management (The Netherlands)
Training project managers in the principles of stakeholder engagement and process design

• British Property Foundation/Local Government Association (FUR)
Development & delivery of collaborative working between councillors and developers.

• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
An introduction to The Strategic Choice Approach to Decision Taking as part of a masters program

• Local health promotion & disease prevention services (Flanders, Belgium)
Training program mangers in Workshop design and facilitation

• Reading Primary Care Trust
Stakeholder involvement in service planning.

• Luton Borough Council
Mentoring community groups through SRB funding applications and appraisal process.

Training need not be a discreet event, engagement projects often have elements of training and mentoring built into them. An example is our work with Finding Sanctuary

 

Trainers

Lynn Wetenhall is Director of Lynn Wetenhall Associates, and has over 15 years of experience in the field of stakeholder engagement and as a trainer. She has two particular areas of focus - multi-organisation collaboration / partnership working and building the capacity of organisations as a whole, to improve their stakeholder-related work. As a trainer, she works with a range of learning approaches and incorporates the principles of Accelerated Learning into her work. She is passionate about delivering learning activities that are realistically pitched, so that participants can actually apply what they have learnt.

She has a wealth of experience accrued through her work as an independent consultant and from working in local government and voluntary organisations.
Lynn is a Dialogue and Engagement Specialist with the Government’s Sciencewise Expert Resource Centre. There's more on LinkedIn

Brendan Hickling is an independent consultant with over twelve years’ experience in mediation, facilitation and training. His primary focus is in dispute resolution where he has work as a mediator in community and education contexts and as a facilitator in government and industry sponsored processes. In the last couple of years Brendan has collaborated with business schools in both the Netherlands and Belgium to create a series of very successful training programs which cover all aspects of process design, event facilitation and conflict resolution. More on LinkedIn

Rolf Muller is a Regional Director of the Dutch Service for Water and Land Management Rolf and has been involved in stakeholder engagement and group decision making processes for over 30 years. He is a co-trainer and developer with Brendan Hickling of the Process Architecture and Workshop Facilitation Skills courses in the Netherlands and Belgium. There is more about Rolf on LinkedIn

Rob Angell is Director of R K Partnership. Read more about Rob here, and / or on LinkedIn. Rob has designed and delivered training in facilitation skills and the design and management of stakeholder engagement process for both public and private sector clients over the last 10 years. As one of the UK's facilitators with in depth experience of designing, running and facilitating national level, complex and highly contentious stakeholder engagment process Rob brings key insights to the training.

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