Strategic planning the Solution Focus way for a Children’s Aid Society: How to build on the clients existing planning strategic skills and create greater alignment with customers and community stakeholders
Alan Kay is a retired SF practitioner who learned solution focus from SFBT family therapy trainers. He saw immediate success with business clients by simply translating SF into the client’s language. He offers his clients solutions in strategic and operational planning, customer experience implementation and, more recently SF training and management development. His many clients range from large banks, to educators, to film festival organizers. His work is based on the entire continuum of the engagement; that the change the client wants starts happening right away; be most pronounced in the main activity and sustain afterwards via follow-through.
With over 25 years working as a facilitator, trainer and coach in both global companies and in academia, I strive to better understand and master the art of leading useful and mindful interactions. In recent years I have devoted most of my time in designing and facilitating 6-12 month leadership programmes.
Unlike Obelix, I have not fallen into the Druid’s cauldron at a young age. I had to learn and experiment with SF, one assumption at a time. Discovering this approach in 2005 has fundamentally transformed the way I work with my clients and I trust that SFiO can support leaders and organisations across all cultures to lead change more effectively.
Chris Corrigan, Harvest Moon Consulting, is a highly experienced trainer of facilitation and also facilitates, strategic design and decision making. He specialises in large group participatory processes for strategic conversations.
Chris is also a noted speaker and a well known teacher and steward of the Art of Hosting, an approach to participatory leadership practiced worldwide.
He is well known for his ability to convey the message of complexity and Cynefin with clarity.
Haesun Moon is a communication scientist and educator based in Toronto, Canada. She cares about people having more and better conversations at home and at workplaces. Her academic and professional research in coaching dialogues and pedagogy from the University of Toronto introduced a simple coaching model, Dialogic Orientation Quadrant, that has transformed the way people coach and learn coaching worldwide. Haesun teaches Brief Coaching at the University of Toronto and serves as Executive Director at the Canadian Centre for Brief Coaching. She loves dogs, roasts her own coffee, and is particular about her choice of pens.
Janet Bavelas’ research team specializes in the study of face-to-face dialogue in both the experimental lab and applied settings. Our basic research focuses on identifying the unique features of face-to-face dialogue, especially (a) reciprocal influence and collaboration and (b) visible actions that are integrated with speech (e.g., hand and facial gestures).
This research has applications in psychotherapy, medical communication, and any other setting where dialogue is important. Our primary research method is microanalysis of dialogue–the reliable, moment-by-moment analysis of video recordings of actual dialogues.
I am passionate about helping you build the competence and confidence needed to lean in to interpersonal tension. Why? Because I believe that not doing so leads to missed opportunities. What difference would it make if you could feel more comfortable having difficult conversations? What might improve if your team was better equipped to work through complex problems? After years of witnessing the detrimental effects of conflict gone wrong, I want to help you do conflict better.
Olayinka Madamidola helps professionals, leaders, and organizations manage workplace stress, prevent burnout, and build resilience during times of change, crisis, and uncertainty. Through her organization, Family Matters Plus, she provides practical, strengths-based, and Solution Focused support that helps individuals and teams restore calm, regain confidence, and move forward with clarity.
Her work is grounded in the belief that even in the midst of disruption, people and organizations retain strengths, capabilities, and resources that can be built upon. Known for her thoughtful presence and reflective facilitation style, Olayinka creates conversations that help people slow down, notice what is already working, and discover meaningful next steps. Whether supporting leaders, teams, or individuals, she brings a compassionate and practical approach that enables lasting change while strengthening resilience and wellbeing.
Sara Healing (B.A., hons., M.Sc., Psychology, University of Victoria, Canada). Her honours thesis (published as Healing & Bavelas, 2011) was an experiment on the effects of two different lines of questioning about the same task.. For her M.Sc. thesis, she developed a microanalysis that identified the unique information that an individual patient can contribute to oncology consultations.
Her primary research interests are using microanalysis to study face-to-face dialogue; she has collaborated in 18 such studies, including both basic research in lab experiments and applications of the method in various applied settings, especially medical and psychotherapy dialogues. Her publications include experiments on hand and facial gestures in psycholinguistics journals, bad-news delivery in a medical journal, and a review chapter in a language and social interaction handbook. As part of International Microanalysis Associates, she teaches international professional workshops on microanalysis and communication research.
Soft skills are foundational because they are what we use to develop all other skills. The criticality of these often-underestimated abilities is frequently missed. Soft skills enable the successful execution of everything else. For many years I have been focusing on designing and facilitating a variety of offerings to help people, individually and in groups, to grow these capacities. The core of this learning is self-awareness, social-ability, confidence and conflict resolution.