Conference Program 2026
14–16 October · Geelong, Australia · Tap any session to explore
As facilitators, it's easy to get caught in the doing — schedules, outlines, breakout rooms, chats. We may master tools and methods, yet feel vaguely unfulfilled.
You will gain self-awareness: clear recognition of your relationship with presence. Through dialogue and feedback, you'll practice distinguishing when you're authentically connected versus distracted or removed — cultivating the quality of presence that enables genuine connection and transformation within groups.
For too long, debate has been the lauded approach to public discourse, driving polarity, cherry-picking of facts and a win-lose dynamic. Unified Debate marries debate and dialogic approaches that can be used to find the hidden truths that are often shared but unable to be voiced in the increasingly polarised world we live in.
You'll explore a different model for working with complex topics, have direct experience of the model in application, and explore its application to your personal context.
At times facilitating finds us in challenging situations — familiar and trusted approaches not working as expected. You feel stuck and anxious. You don't know what to do. You're feeling overwhelmed or your mind's just blank.
In this workshop you will explore your own facilitation 'stress buttons', fears and resistance in yourself and/or the group. You will find new ways to overcome these 'functional freeze' moments, allowing you to access your existing resources and tap into yet unrealised capacities. Instead of responding to stress with fight, flight or freeze, we can face interesting group dynamics and stressful situations with curiosity.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
In a world where facilitation techniques and methods abound, facilitators can find themselves navigating a sea of advice and 'best practices'. The pressure to adopt the latest techniques or emulate seasoned experts can sometimes overshadow the unique strengths and personality that each facilitator brings to the table, leading to less effective and less fulfilling outcomes.
You'll gain an understanding of unique facilitation styles, and come to see that it's not only natural but essential to stay true to yourself. You'll feel empowered to adapt tools and methods to fit both your session's purpose and your own style.
How often do you facilitate a meeting and despite your best efforts, the loudmouths dominate and the rest of the group contributes very little? Time to move past the usual fixes and uncover a totally different medium!
This hands-on methodology guarantees that every person in the room has a voice — and that they bring out their best creative thinking and ideas. LEGO® Serious Play is grounded in constructionist learning theory and has two decades of organisational application in a wide range of contexts.
Join this session to learn more about:
- How to apply the method in a real setting — experience the power of building metaphorical, abstract models
- Ways in which you can apply the method in the work you do to build stronger teams or to develop strategy
- Different ways in which you can apply LEGO® Serious Play based on client or stakeholder needs to help the group achieve their outcomes in an inclusive way
A fast-paced, highly interactive workshop designed for facilitators who want to move groups confidently from ideas to decisions. Rather than focusing on theory, you will experience a practical range of prioritisation and decision-making methods you can immediately use in real-world group settings.
Across the session, we'll explore a range of approaches — from quick, intuitive techniques for low-stakes choices through to more structured methods suited to complex or deliberative contexts. Activities include playful voting experiments, refined dotmocracy, weighted scoring and consensus-based rating, each followed by short, focused debriefs. Together we'll unpack when each method works best, where the risks lie, and how context and purpose shape good decision-making.
You'll leave with a clearer understanding of how to select and adapt methods to suit different groups, timeframes and decision types — and greater confidence navigating the tricky moment after the brainstorm.
This highly interactive workshop supports facilitators to move from competence to capability by exploring how the IAF Core Competencies are intentionally enacted through different facilitation practice lenses. Using a creative twist on the World Café method, participants rotate through facilitated conversations focused on four core practice lenses: Designing the Process, Holding the Group, Enabling Participation, and Supporting Group Outcomes.
Through structured group dialogue, shared reflection, and hands-on co-creation, you will collectively build a Facilitator Capability Map — a practical, developmental tool that connects competencies to real-world examples, common risks, and simple, actionable ways to strengthen practice.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
This highly interactive 90-minute session gives leaders a direct, embodied experience of Sun-Tzu's concept of SHIH — the art of creating advantage through positioning, timing, and the natural flow of events. Instead of pushing change or relying on pressure, participants experience SHIH as a felt sense of 'effortless advantage' and directly feel how positioning, timing, and the impact that small adjustments create.
Change is relentless. Restructures, new systems, shifting priorities — and somewhere along the way, the usual approaches stop landing.
You will gain a go-to diagnostic lens — and the questions it helps you to ask — by using a simple 4-lens framework to find new leverage and breakthrough points when change feels stuck.
This session models facilitation in action by engaging participants in live, experiential use of 10 different debriefing techniques, each intentionally sequenced and facilitated in real time.
Rather than describing facilitation concepts, it shows them through active practice: setting context, managing group energy, choosing appropriate methods, and guiding reflection. You will experience the full arc of facilitation — how to introduce a tool, invite participation, adapt to the group's response, and draw meaning from the activity.
Based on the Click! Colours methodology, this introductory session highlights how to understand and adapt your facilitation to ensure that all participants have a sense of contribution and belonging.
Click! Colours uses colour and representative characters to decode the four personality styles that can be found in all of us. Using Click! Colours you will learn simple and effective techniques to design your sessions for diverse groups and engage with people in a way that brings out their best — going beyond facilitating groups to interacting with individuals, attending client meetings, managing personal relationships, and more.
Designed as a taster of the broader two-day Creative Facilitation training, this workshop invites you to rethink the facilitator's role and approach. It will challenge some of the assumptions you make about facilitation and explore what's possible when you confidently respond to the energy in the room. Rather than hearing about these facilitation techniques, you'll experience them.
You'll discover how simple shifts in design can energise, deepen engagement and unlock the collective intelligence already present within a group. You'll explore practical methods for encouraging conversations and creating experiences that people remember long after the session ends. Developed by Johnnie Moore (UK) and Viv McWaters (Australia), Creative Facilitation helps facilitators create conditions for genuine participation, connection and action, while surfacing diverse perspectives.
Whether you facilitate workshops, meetings, training programs, classrooms, or community conversations, you'll leave with usable tools and fresh insights into the art of working responsively with groups.
As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in how we work, what does this mean for the role of human facilitators? Will AI become a helpful co-pilot, a dominating force — or trigger a renewed focus on authentic, human connection?
You will contribute to a vibrant conversation about the future of facilitation and AI and experience a coaching-based model for collaborative problem-solving.
Most facilitators work hard to hold attention — yet the brain is wired to drift, filter, and miss things in plain sight. This innovative, disruptive session shows facilitators how to use learning science to design engagement that sticks.
You will gain an understanding of how attention works in real facilitation environments, including inattentional blindness, predictive processing, novelty, and open loops.
This interactive workshop invites participants to explore how the art of facilitation can become more intentionally inclusive, so it works for more people — not just those the system already favours.
Drawing on Nancy Fraser's social justice work, participants are introduced to the POWER Framework — five practical elements that shape inclusion in any gathering: Access, Representation, Equal Voice, Responsive Action and Power Structures. Working with real facilitation scenarios, participants collaborate to examine how power, recognition and representation show up in everyday workshops and meetings.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
As facilitators, many of us aspire to hold dialogues that could hold space for genuine transformation in our uncharted and precarious times. Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe asks, "what if the ways we respond to the crisis is a part of the crisis?" After questioning what if the ways that I/we facilitate perpetuate the crises, Pru Gell founded her intercultural organisation Coming To Life.
This experiential session offers a constellation of the three core elements that underpin Coming To Life's offerings: education on decolonising; connecting to Country and the natural world; and presencing and nervous system regulation practices. Participants will experience how it feels to be guided through and immersed in these elements, and the presence and felt sense that can emerge. From here, facilitators can speculate how it may feel to offer their own participants such an experience, and the fruits that could emerge from such a vantage point as they contribute to transformation on a personal, organisational-wide and systems-change level.
As AI becomes embedded in how work gets done, facilitators face a critical shift: it is no longer enough to transfer knowledge or guide discussion — we must actively protect and strengthen people's ability to think, learn and engage. As AI increasingly performs cognitive tasks, there is a real risk that participants outsource their thinking, leading to a gradual erosion of critical thinking, curiosity and learning depth.
This session is designed for facilitators who want to stay relevant and effective in this changing landscape. It focuses on the practical implications of AI for facilitation design and delivery — what needs to change, what must be preserved, and where facilitators can add the greatest value.
Participants will explore:
- How AI is changing participant behaviour, attention and expectations in learning environments
- The risks of "outsourced thinking" and how it shows up in workshops and programs
- How to design sessions that require thinking, not just participation
- Techniques to deepen reflection, dialogue and sensemaking
Ultimately, this is about redefining the role of the facilitator — from content expert to architect of thinking — ensuring that in an AI-enabled world, human capability doesn't just survive, but strengthens.
Camp Venture is a fun and engaging gamified community development experience that helps groups move from silos and deficits to creativity, collaboration and collective action through quests, storytelling, asset mapping and interactive play.
The Helping Hands Program is a team-building activity where teams collaboratively build and donate prosthetic hands for individuals in need, including landmine amputees and those born without, or who have lost, a hand.
Participants collaborate to construct prosthetic hands, quickly appreciating the daily challenges faced by amputees, including assembling the hand using only their non-dominant hand to simulate the experience. The activity empowers every participant to make a real and lasting contribution, reminding people what it feels like to be engaged in a truly purposeful activity. Participants also create a unique piece of art to personalise their donation.
The program guides organisations toward modelling true collaboration, commitment, quality, and customer care, all while engaging in a purposeful activity. Working in small teams of 3–4 allows organisers to mix groups to build cross-functional relationships. The program scales well for larger groups – the bigger the group, the greater the collective energy and impact.
The activity delivers powerful lessons in empathy, resilience, and perspective, while strengthening collaboration, communication, and problem-solving skills within a meaningful shared goal.
A playful team simulation that reveals how groups really collaborate, from groupthink and blind spots to the ability to hear and harness different perspectives.
What happens when a group has to make sense of something together, but no one has the full picture? Once Upon Align is a playful team simulation that brings the invisible dynamics of collaboration into view. Working together against the clock, participants have to share perspectives, make decisions and create meaning from incomplete information.
It's fun in the moment, but the real value comes afterwards. The experience opens up a rich conversation about how teams actually work together, revealing strengths and friction points including groupthink, blind spots, whose voices get heard, and how well a group can harness different perspectives.
A deceptively simple game with plenty to unpack.
We've all had times in running meetings where despite clear desired outcomes and a great agenda, our groups haven't been able to get the results they really wanted. And it gets even harder with large groups, complex issues, and tons of ambiguity.
Attendees will gain practical tools to increase their groups' comfort levels with drawing — moving drawing from being a 'scary-but-fun warm-up' to a smart strategic sense-maker.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
This hands-on workshop invites you into the world of Liberating Structures — a set of simple, powerful facilitation techniques that help teams unlock creativity, deepen collaboration, and spark meaningful conversations.
Through immersive, fast-paced activities, you'll experience firsthand how these structures create space for every voice, enable more inclusive decision-making, and energise group problem-solving.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →Emotions sit at the heart of learning, behaviour change, and human connection — yet many facilitators lack practical ways to bring them to life in their programs. This highly experiential, evidence-based workshop is designed specifically for facilitators, trainers, coaches, and consultants who want to confidently work with emotions in group settings.
You will deepen your understanding of how emotions influence cognitive function, learning, relationships, and performance, and learn how to harness the energy of different emotional states to generate meaningful outcomes. You'll leave with practical, engaging methods you can immediately integrate into training programs to build emotional agility, resilience, and wellbeing in others.
🎙 Ep 13: Positive Psychology & Human Flourishing → 🎙 Ep 18: In the Age of AI, the Future Is Human →
This session demonstrates facilitation in action by making the facilitation process itself the learning medium. Rather than explaining facilitation concepts, participants actively engage in short cycles of practice, observation, reflection, and integration within triads.
Through these cycles, you will experience facilitation as an embodied and relational practice, rather than a set of techniques or tools.
Most facilitators are either struggling to be seen in a saturated market, or doing something so different that people don't immediately understand why they need it. This session tackles both.
Being great at what you do isn't always enough to win the work, especially when potential clients have dozens of people who appear to offer the same thing.
In this session, Sarah Davies will show you how to stand out for the right reasons, become easier to choose and create a business that isn't competing on price, even in a saturated market.
You'll discover how to:
- Get clear on exactly who your best-fit clients are
- Write social media posts that speak directly to your ideal clients and build genuine connection
- Create your own origin story so people understand who you are and why you do what you do
- Define a clear vision and goal for the next 12 months, and leave motivated to become more visible, relevant and in demand
- Understand where all of this fits into a simple marketing funnel
Stop being overlooked and become the go-to choice for your expertise.
Experience how shared purpose can be transformed into coordinated, real-world progress through the Technology of Participation (ToP) Action Planning method — a robust, structured and globally recognised approach known for its principles of inclusion, creativity, and consensus-building.
Most facilitators have run a session that genuinely shifted something in the room, only to return weeks later and find the energy has drained away. This hands-on session sits with that problem honestly, looking at why the moments we design so carefully often fail to survive an ordinary week, and what it takes to build rituals a team will keep doing once the facilitator has left the building. Working in small groups with the Workplace Rituals Deck, you will surface a real connection gap in a team you know, then craft a ritual to address it using the PARR Model — the framework built alongside the deck. From there you will pressure-test your design against the Rituals Proof Test, a simple set of questions for working out whether a ritual will stick. Groups pitch their rituals and trade insights across the room, and you will leave with a repeatable method you can bring straight into your own practice.
Facilitation has never been more important, yet many facilitators still struggle to articulate the value and impact of their work. This session isn't about learning new techniques. It's about transforming how we think about our facilitation practice and the contribution it makes.
Through shared stories, reflective dialogue, and collaborative inquiry, we'll explore the value we bring to groups and organisations, and the impact that has for participants and the space in which they work.
You will leave with a renewed understanding of your role, greater confidence in the value you create, and practical ways to communicate your impact with clients and decision-makers.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →Facilitators are often trained in tools, techniques and frameworks. But when groups become emotional, angry, polarised, grieving, traumatised or stuck, it is not methodology alone that carries the space — it is the facilitator's presence, spontaneity and capacity to remain alive and responsive under pressure.
This experiential workshop introduces participants to key psychodramatic concepts, including warm-up, roles and spontaneity, and explores how these shape both the facilitation process and group outcomes. Through the psychodramatic ritual of warm-up, enactment and sharing, participants will strengthen their capacity to stay present, embodied, creative and responsive in complex group situations.
The session also provides an introduction to sociodrama, demonstrating how enacting social systems can deepen collective insight, reveal hidden dynamics, and open new possibilities for shared understanding and collective change.
This experiential session introduces systemic principles and constellation work in a way that is practical, accessible, and immediately relevant for experienced facilitators working with leaders and leadership teams.
Attendees will gain a direct, embodied experience of how constellations make system dynamics visible without analysis or fixing. Participants leave with a simple constellation-based exercise they can use themselves, greater confidence in trusting embodied information, and practical insight into how honouring system dynamics strengthens leadership, teams, and facilitation conversations.
Conflict is an inevitable aspect of bringing people together to work on a shared project or decision, irrespective of complexity. The danger for any facilitator is letting that conflict escalate or go untended.
Attendees will explore a range of multimodal methods and apply these in practice and application to test elements of the method process and individual and group effectiveness.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
We'll be exploring situations where we are unable to role-reverse with 'the other' and reflect on how this impacts our agency in being effective at working with and positively affecting 'the other', and our relationship with them and ourselves.
We'll engage with what we might learn from an expansion in experiencing 'being the other' — by authentically walking in the other's shoes and conferring the gift of being 'truly seen'. The exploration will enrich and nourish our practices in working with clients or even daring to reflect and act on our own lives and dreams.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
This comprehensive workshop equips facilitators to use Barri Marruma as a transformative facilitation technique for genuine engagement with First Nations communities and Country-centric project work. Developed by Murawin Pty Ltd and grounded in over a decade of real-world application, this framework moves beyond traditional consultation approaches to embed Indigenous worldviews, deep listening, and authentic collaboration at the heart of facilitation practice.
Barri Marruma — which translates from Dunghutti language as 'to build or construct Country/place' — provides facilitators with a holistic methodology that honours the interconnected relationships between land, water, sky, animals, and people. The framework's four phases (Earth, Water, Fire, and Sky) are not linear steps but rather cyclical, interdependent elements that mirror Country itself. You will learn to facilitate engagement that establishes deep roots through authentic listening, enables reciprocal knowledge exchange, catalyses meaningful change, and co-creates ambitious visions with Country at the centre.
Restorative approaches can be viewed as a collective set of understandings which help us to appreciate the primacy of relationships to humans. When our relationships thrive, so do we. When our relationships are broken — whether through conflict, disharmony or whether our values are breached — we experience shame. Shame impacts us biologically, neurologically and most importantly behaviourally.
In this session we will explore how to use these understandings to enhance your facilitation — through personal growth, or for use in situations of social disruption or enhancing corporate outcomes. We will look at core facilitation skills in the context of restorative conversations (1:1), Circles (group work), semi-formal and formal meetings, as well as guided processes for structured problem solving or conflict resolution.
This hands-on workshop turns everyday conversations into micro-transformations and equips participants with two lightweight but powerful pathways: the DRIP Flow (Detect–Reflect–Ideate–Practice) — a fast, crowd-powered way to notice and fix the small stuff — and Slicers, a simple method to break intimidating Big Fixes into Small and Everyday fixes, so they stop stalling and start flowing.
You'll practise fixing your own drips and slicing big rocks into pebbles. You'll leave with a Fix Toolkit Canvas that you can apply the very next day, building a culture where small conversations and actions sustain big transformations.
Power is always present in facilitation — whether we name it or not. It shows up in who speaks first, who speaks more often, whose ideas carry weight, who holds decision-making authority, and whose lived experience is marginalised or amplified.
You will increase your awareness of visible and invisible power in facilitated spaces, and understand personal, political and spiritual forms of rank.
When we strip away all the techniques and tools — the polls, the Miro boards, branded post-it notes, the beautiful markers — what is really at the heart of effective facilitation? What do we even mean by effective?
You will gain a greater awareness of your core skills and capacities as a facilitator and the confidence to work in challenging situations, when things change.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
In complex, uncertain environments, facilitation is no longer just about managing processes — it is about who we are while we facilitate. Breath to Being is a deeply experiential session that invites facilitators to work at the intersection of inner awareness and collective transformation, using presence as the primary instrument of change.
You will learn to regulate your inner state using breath and embodiment to remain grounded in complexity, and shift consciously from agenda-driven control to presence-based facilitation.
Start your final conference day with an optional early morning Tai Chi session. Open to all — no experience required. Come as you are and leave feeling centred, balanced and ready for the day.
In a world grappling with complexity and change, the S.E.R.V.E framework offers facilitators and leaders a simple yet powerful roadmap to move groups from confusion to clarity, from challenge to possibility. Grounded in Eastern wisdom and contemporary facilitation tools, this session bridges heart and strategy to enable group and team transformation.
You will learn how to guide diverse voices toward alignment and take away adaptable tools you can use immediately in your facilitation practice. This session will empower you to design transformative group processes that ignite courage, resilience, and action.
🎙 Listen to the podcast episode →
Drawing on contemporary neuroscience, behavioural science and embodied learning theory, Paula Johnston explores how facilitation design directly influences nervous system state, psychological safety and a group's capacity for insight, collaboration and change.
You will learn to recognise how nervous system regulation shapes engagement, insight and group behaviour in facilitated conversations.
Facilitation lives (or dies) in the invisible layer: what we assume is 'true', how we relate to uncertainty, and the stance we bring when groups get stuck. Yet most of us rarely pause to see how our own learning history shapes our presence, patterns, and default moves.
In this highly interactive, reflective lab, participants will complete the Learning Maturity Arches exercise: a simple, visual mapping of your learning life — the skills and knowledge visible above the surface, as well as the often-unknown drivers of attitudes, values and mindsets beneath the surface. You'll identify emerging patterns and 'hotspots', then work in pairs to receive appreciative reflections and craft a clear Learning Edge — the next growth arch you want to step into. You'll leave with a completed map, a grounded intention, and one practical shift you can take into your next session.
Our founder, Glen Ochre, often said: 'First, facilitate thyself.' To be the best facilitators we can be, we need to be grounded, present, compassionate, and able to respond — rather than react — to what is happening in a group.
You will explore the Community of Selves model and apply the model to personal reflection and facilitation practice.
In today's rapidly changing and complex organisational environments, meetings, agendas, and plans alone are not enough to drive meaningful change. This highly interactive workshop equips facilitators and leaders to move groups from discussion to tangible outcomes.
You will navigate complexity and uncertainty in organisational systems using adaptive facilitation techniques, and apply self-as-instrument facilitation, presence, and relational awareness to enhance group engagement.
A facilitated collective reflection session bringing all delegates together to harvest key learnings, insights and connections from across the three days of the conference.