Facilitation

Infusion use a range of techniques to encourage and enable participation. Our facilitation is enhanced by a range of specialist techniques, including:

Sculpting

Sculpting and other non-language techniques offer opportunities for thinking creatively about issues without using language. We used these techniques when working with groups of Social Work students: we asked them in small groups to sculpt various scenarios to demonstrate power in social work relationships.

Person Centred Planning approaches

These are inclusive tools for organisational and personal planning. These approaches are often helpful for individuals, teams and organisations at times of change and offer ways of thinking differently about the future. They also help build the energy to move towards that future. We used a PATH (a person centred planning tool) with the service users’ committee of a citizen advocacy project to help members plan their activities for the coming year.

Graphic Facilitation

A graphic recording is a visual, drawn record of an event – a workshop, focus group or presentation for example. The recording takes place live as the discussion goes along. The resulting record is in images, often with some key words included.

• Promotes creativity
• Helps participants think "outside the box"
• Ensures accuracy in recording
• Prepares participants for next stage of the event
• Empowers participants
• Provides an alternative focus
• Expresses complex ideas and feelings
• Assists memory

Forum Theatre

Is a proven non-threatening way of helping groups to develop their tactics in dealing with difficult or new situations, come to shared understandings of complex concepts and much more.

In a forum theatre performance, participants get the chance to be “spectators”, making suggestions for changing the script, directing the behaviour of the actors, or stepping in themselves during the second run through of the scene.

For example, in the course of a contract for the Scottish Executive on Single Shared Assessment, we used adapted Forum Theatre techniques to establish a shared understanding of the meaning of “assessment” with three groups of service users.