Frequently Asked Questions

At Cocreate Catalyst, we work with clients of all sizes, from small startups to large corporations. We have experience with not for profit, corporate and government clients and partners. We also specialise in working with collectives and mutli-organisation collaborations. If you're coming with purpose, we're very happy to help.

This can be a tough question - bringing in an external facilitator requires some investment of time and money to get right. In short then, our first answer would be "when getting the right outcome is worth it".

The reality is that often a facilitator is able to hold space that you can't. They have a crucial role in creating the right space - physically, emotionally, relationally - for your most important conversations to take place. It is almost impossible to do a good job of both facilitating a conversation and being in it. 

When your voice needs to be in the conversation - as a leader, expert or participant - a good facilitator can enable you, and the other participants, to be at their best. 

Common cases when an independent facilitator might be valuable include:

• Creating strategy and aligning across a leadership team
• Working through complex or sensitive issues
• Bringing multiple parties together in a way that creates a more level playing field
• When power is uneven or trust is incomplete
• Enabling reflection, learning and adaptation in a group

Good facilitation is not innate - like many things it is a craft that needs to be honed through time, experience and deliberate attention.

A great facilitator needs to balance many different needs. They must simultaneously be:

• Relational. Your facilitator needs to be able to hold the room safely and create the conditions where trust can grow. This might mean meeting people where they are at, sharing a joke, building rapport. It might also mean being able to bring gravity and challenge in a way that is authentic and thoughtful.
• Situational. They need to be able to quickly learn and understand your unique context and understand what really matters to you. You will be relying on your facilitator at times to help take the conversation where it needs to go - you want confidence that they know you well enough to make good choices.
• Curious. Great solutions emerge through group genius; they don't come into a conversation pre-baked. Your facilitator needs to help elicit the best thinking from everyone and ask good questions to help great thinking to emerge.
• Outcome-oriented. There are many ways to get to any given place - the important thing is to travel well and to get there in the end. A great facilitator should not be wedded to finding a particular pathway, solution or output, but should be absolutely committed to ensuring you get to the right place in the end.
• Structured and smart. The right frameworks, principles and models can be incredibly helpful in ensuring that the work you do together remains coherent and aligned. Knowing that your facilitator understands the structure and logic behind your work means you can trust them to keep it all connected, even when it's messy and complex.

Come and talk to us to share your own perspective and see if we can help.

We think about purpose in its truest sense as being the reason why a person, team, organisation or partnership exists. The unique contribution it seeks to make to the world around it.

Purpose becomes meaningful when it is shared and when it is activated and aligned, through strategy, policy, operations, culture and behaviours. It is one of the most valuable tools an organisation has when it comes to creating coherence and alignment in a complex space. 

See more on Purpose through this article, from Adam Jay.

Strategies need to have value for an organisation beyond the documents they are carried in, and beyond the leadership teams that likely creted them. For a strategy to be effective in practice, it means that people use it and find value in it at every level of the organisation or partnership.

Often this is dependent on an organisation's ability to communicate the core tenets of a strategy – priorities, principles, intent – in a way that allows others across the organisation to own it, shape it and use it themselves. 

A useful test is whether your strategy helps people to make better decisions in practice. If it's not shaping day to day choices, priorities and tradeoffs, it might not be working as designed.

See more in this article on our "Insights" page.

This is not an uncommon experience. You have set a strategy, named priorities, and communicated it well. But it hasn't created cut through - you still feel like the organisation is pushing everything forward at the same time.

There could be many reasons for this. Some of the most common are:

• People are still attached to their previous favourite initatives
• We have not been clear how we will stop, or transition from old priorities
• Our incentives and measures are still based on old priorities
• Our environment keeps changing and so people are hedging their bets.

It's important to engage, listen and understand what is driving behaviours before seeking to remedy them. Creating clarity isn't always about communicating more - it's more often about listening for the signal, and taking away the noise.

See more in this article.