All About Mediation Training

Title: Great Meetings! Great Results
by Dee Kelsey and Pam Plumb
Publisher: Hanson Park Press; ISBN: 0965835413

From the Publisher

It isn’t easy to work as a group. Managing a successful meeting takes planning and preparation, a host of facilitation skills and a full bag of process tools. For leaders and participants alike, Great Meetings! Great Results is a practical guide for making your steady stream of meetings more exciting, productive, creative and fun.

Contents

• Facilitation: The Key to a Great Meeting
• Knowing Your Group
• Getting a Good Start
• Designing a Great Meeting
• Understanding Process
• Choosing the Right Tool
• Maximizing Your Group’s Potential
• Promoting Positive Communication
• Managing Conflict in Groups
• Interventions: When to Step In
• Integrating Graphics into Your Meetings
• Reflections on the Art of Facilitation

Title: Extreme Facilitation: Guiding Groups Through Controversy and Complexity
by Suzanne Ghais
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787975931

From the Publisher

Extreme Facilitation picks up where other books on the topic leave off, to present a revolutionary method that helps large, unwieldy, adversarial, and apparently dysfunctional groups achieve consensus and reach objectives on divisive and contentious issues no matter how long the group has been struggling.

Throughout the book, expert facilitator Suzanne Ghais shows how extreme facilitation – which put the emphasis on creativity, flexibility, and customization – can change how group members interact with one another and how participants view the issues even in the most challenging and exceptionally difficult situations.

Extreme Facilitation covers the preparatory phases of the process, including assessment, convening, and contracting. Ghais also offers vital information on process design and tips for handling situations that many facilitators find particularly challenging.

This groundbreaking book offers suggestions for the facilitator who must cultivate a strong presence, trustworthiness, and creativity, and have a clear understanding of the group’s goals, needs, culture, and external conditions, such as pressures, requirements, and constraints.

The extreme facilitator draws on a wide range of techniques that are driven by the needs of the group, not by the techniques themselves. To be truly effective, the facilitator must call on all of the group’s physical, intellectual, emotional, intuitive, creative, and spiritual capacities.

Extreme Facilitation will help both experience facilitators and those new to the process become more confident and competent when faced with the most daunting challenges.

Title: Advanced Facilitation Strategies: Tools & Techniques to Master Difficult Situations
by Ingrid Bens
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787977306

From the Publisher

From Ingrid Bens, the author of the best-selling book Facilitating with Ease!, comes the next-step resource for project leaders, managers, community leaders, teachers, and other facilitators who want to hone their skills in order to deal with complex situations.

Advanced Facilitation Strategies is a field guide that offers practical strategies and techniques for working with challenging everyday situations. These proven strategies and techniques are based on experience gleaned from hundreds of facilitated activities in organizations of all sizes and in all sectors.

Both novice and seasoned facilitators who have firsthand experience designing and leading meetings will benefit from this reality-based playbook. Advanced Facilitation Strategies is filled with the information facilitators need to

• Become better at diagnosing facilitation assignments and creative effective process designs
• Broaden their repertoire of tools to make impromptu design changes whenever they are needed
• Learn to be more resilient and confident when dealing with dysfunctional situations and difficult people

This book includes techniques for dealing with dilemmas in facilitations, shows how to maintain neutrality in various situations, and reveals how to work effectively with group leaders. Bens outlines six common decision quandaries and offers tips on how advanced facilitators resolve them. She suggests various tools that can be used to intervene in group conflicts in order to put participants back on track. The author also outlines five steps for managing complex situations – assessment, design, contracting, implementation, and follow-up – and shows how to implement each step to maximize effectiveness.

Advanced Facilitation Strategies, with and accompanying CD-ROM, is a valuable toolkit filled with customizable instruments, charts, tools, checklists, references, and guides for all practitioners.

Title: The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook
by Roger Schwarz, Anne Davidson, Peg Carlson, Sue McKinney
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787964948

From the Publisher

Since it was first published in 1994, Roger Schwarz’s The Skilled Facilitator has become a landmark book in the field. It is a classic book for consultants, facilitators, managers, leaders, trainers, and coaches – anyone whose role is to guide groups toward realizing their creative problem-solving potential.

The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook is based on the same proven principles outlined in Schwarz’s groundbreaking book. The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook is the next-step resource that offers consultants, facilitators, managers, leaders, trainers, and coaches the tools, exercises, models, and stories that will help them develop sound responses to a wide range of challenging situations. The book spans the full scope of the successful Skilled Facilitator approach and includes information on how to get started and guidance for integrating the approach within existing organizational structures and processes.

With contributions from some of the field’s most thoughtful practitioners, this book is filled with suggestions, exercises, and examples for creating effective relationships, teams, and organizations. It includes tips, tools, and model interventions that you can use in any role.

Step by step, the book provides practical guidance for introducing the ground rules and guidelines for engaging in deep-level interventions. In addition, The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook contains helpful worksheets and templates.

Title: Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making
by Sam Kaner with Lenny Lind, Catherine Toldi, Sarah Fisk, Duane Berger
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 2nd edition; ISBN: 0787982660

From the Publisher

And now this classic book is even better –much better. Completely revised and updated, the second edition is loaded with new tools and techniques.

• Two powerful new chapters on agenda design
• A full section devoted to reaching closure
• More than twice as many tools for handling difficult dynamics
• 70 brand-new pages and over 100 pages significantly improved