Modern Facilitation Fundamentals – 2 days – English/Virtual

Course Description 

Join us for a 2-day immersion into core facilitation mindsets, skills and tools – including AI.

Facilitation is a dynamic, adaptive mindset and skillset enabling individuals to guide groups through complex conversations, build alignment, and co-create impactful outcomes. It is key to effective leadership and a driver of successful collaboration.

Today, the practice of facilitation has evolved to enhance collaboration and impact through more inclusive design, the use of remote and hybrid session delivery and most recently, the incorporation of AI.

Course Duration

2 days

Course Format

Live – Virtual – English

Target Audience

This course is designed for individuals—leaders, managers, and team members—who are ready to expand their facilitation toolkit and lead high-impact discussions across a range of settings.

Course Content

Participants will leave equipped with the mindset, techniques and practical tools to lead inclusive, effective sessions across virtual, hybrid, and in-person environments, including:

• Intentional session and agenda design
• Essential facilitation skills, such as listening, synthesizing and framing
• Step-by-step facilitated processes
• Understanding group dynamics
• Awareness of common facilitator biases
• The importance of psychological safety
• Managing challenging participant behaviours
• Responsibly leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)

 Learning Modalities

Throughout the course, participants will engage in:

• Practical facilitation exercises and simulations
• Expert-led modeling of techniques and behaviours
• Small group and paired discussions
• Peer feedback

A comprehensive reference manual will be provided for continued learning.

Course Outcomes

By the end of this course, participants will have built a practical and versatile facilitation toolkit to design and lead engaging, outcome-driven conversations. They will be able to confidently apply tools such as issue analysis, decision-making frameworks, and action planning methods.

Participants will also develop a stronger understanding of group dynamics and learn how to encourage participation, navigate facilitator bias, and manage challenging behaviours with clarity and confidence. Most importantly, they will be able to design and deliver sessions that balance structure with flexibility, purpose with process, and dialogue with results.

Learners will be able to:

• Design effective facilitated sessions
• Adopt more inclusive approaches to facilitation
• Ask powerful, purposeful questions
• Facilitate appropriately based on group dynamics
• Apply core facilitation tools and techniques
• Choose and adapt the right tool for the right purpose – including generative AI
• Maintain engagement across various formats
• Manage difficult behaviours with confidence

Course Instructor 

Marc Valois is a Principal and Senior Consultant of the Intersol Group, he is a dynamic and effective group architect, facilitator and enabler for executive dialogue in both official languages.

He has over 25 years of experience in a variety of projects including the provision of engagement strategies in support of multi-stakeholder expert advisory committees, strategic planning, change management, organizational transformation and program and policy development for clients at the most senior levels of government.

Marc has incorporated the use of online engagement technologies in his work. These online spaces have offered his clients the potential for greater reach and higher levels of engagement as participants enjoy a high degree of flexibility to connect “anytime, anyplace”, and can connect with a broader range of perspectives and ideas than they would through traditional face-to-face interaction.