by Sarah Fitton and Simon Wilson Why would you shake a tree? Surely trees are fine as they are and the fruit falls when it will? But some of us are impatient and want to see what happens if… The tree we started shaking is called ‘stakeholder engagement’. This is...

So what if you find you need to run meetings from home? Here are some thoughts… Make sure you have the best equipment set up you can – ideally, cable internet connection rather than wifi, a webcam and a USB headset on your laptop. The last two are not expensive...

Health concerns are pushing virtual meetings up the agenda. Shifting the balance from face to face towards more virtual meetings also helps save money, time and carbon. Yet in practice people often find virtual meetings frustrating, disappointing and ineffective. Having designed and facilitated virtual meetings for more than ten years,...

‘We don’t get asked for them much anymore.  But we must have one somewhere’. It was the first time I realised that the flip chart may be on its way out. I first encountered a flip chart as a meeting participant in the late eighties.  I remembered being baffled as...

We have been facilitating co-production for several years.  In public services this is where the people providing the service and those receiving it work together on equal terms.  We’ve worked with citizens and service providers to improve health and other services. A speech by Mark Brown to a ‘Fulfilling Lives’...

What makes for good trustees and good governance? I am fascinated by this question. I’ve been on several trustee boards – local, national and international – and advised and supported different types of board. I value the volunteer model in which people give their time and expertise to oversee the...

I’ve been working with groups for years, helping them improve how they work together. The question of geography often comes up as a barrier to working together. When I probe, ‘geography’ can mean many things – one team in London, one in LA; a remote outpost in the North, core...

It was one of those moments when I thought I’d got it completely wrong. We had been working on a major project about integrating health and social care – one of the great challenges facing the UK. We had been supporting a collaboration across health and local authorities for more...