Services offered typically draw on the following streams, though often a specific intervention may draw on several:
One-to-one Coaching
This involves an individual exploring their role and situation in one-to-one consultations. The purpose is usually to explore a particular context, but this is with the recognition that it is not split of from the rest of life. Outcomes can range from a person continuing in the same work, but inhabiting it differently through to a person moving to a new role elsewhere.
Analytic-Network Coaching
This is a rich framework for coaching, developed by Simon Western. It is an integrated approach that looks at the deeper parts a person’s life, their web of relationships, their approaches to leadership and their wider network. Mark is a registered Analytic Network Coach, and it draws on many years of one-to-one work with people in commercial and retreat contexts.
Team consultation
This involves a team of people going into an organisation and taking part in conversations with a range of people. It works with what happens in those conversations, but also the informal interactions between the team and the organisation. The aim is for the intervention to lead to change though the learning it enables.
Workshops
This involves people going outside their usual work context, either for a day or for a residential event. This may involve something that looks like a learning event but can also involve less familiar activities such as creative workshops or outdoor things that could be thought of as “team building”, but are done with an awareness of what is below the surface as people explore new things and connect in new ways, enabling learning by seeing and relating to colleagues in new ways.
Some workshops involve working mainly in words, but it's often useful to engage the non-verbal, using images, imagination, creativity — often in paint or drawing — and working outdoors. In the background for these is the idea that some of our thinking lies outside words — in sensations held in the body, in what we dream and imagine. These carry an invitation to see things differently and enable insights from the unconscious to give their fruits.
Learning events
The classic way of learning by experience about processes in groups is through a group relations conference (see foundations). It is possible to adapt that approach for shorter events and one-day workshops.
I also use this approach for workshops to explore specific situations, perhaps as a form of decision-making or envisioning, for events to explore things like reactions to a book, and for events looking at processes in small groups and teams.
Partners
Where it is appropriate to offer consultancy or facilitation as part of a team, there are range of options including independent consultants, associates in Opus, and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and the Analytic-Network Coaching organisation.