Our Work

Fearless Facilitator is often brought in to tackle a specific team or business challenge. But the way we work helps lift the lid, safely and constructively, on the wider underlying issues and concerns that can block an organisation’s progress.

We empower the individuals and teams we work with by:

Reframing a solution in a way that can positively influence the whole system.
Demonstrating the strength in collective voice and shared experience.
Helping participants embrace inquiry constructively (without feeling under cross-examination).
Encouraging curiosity, learning and new habit forming, through experimentation and incremental change.
Creating greater autonomy using safe, but expansive boundary setting. 
Redefining fear of failure so that mistakes are managed with compassion.
Increasing confidence through an uncompromising focus on rigour and quality.
Promoting agency (that feeling of greater control over one’s own actions and consequences) and how to use and apply it productively.
Enhancing relationships.
Improving Team Performance
  • Ministry of Justice – following an organisation-wide merger of different functions, Fearless Facilitator worked with the MoJ to help form leadership teams able to offer high performance support across all new departments.
  • Dow Consumer Solutions – asked to facilitate the first, in-person global executive leadership team strategy event following the extended Covid 19 global lockdown. A uniquely complex operating environment, we created the conditions people needed to (re)connect, establish trust and address enhanced new ways of working and decision making.
  • Boehringer Ingelheim – we helped customer relationship managers and their teams harness their common experience and collective intelligence, despite different reporting lines and ways of working. This allowed a joined up approach to customer focused challenges and opportunities that much more clearly influenced company wide strategy on customer relationships at this global pharmaceutical company.
Operational & Business Challenges
  • University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust – we helped clinical leaders across multiple interrelated disciplines come together for the first time, to design a brand new, integrated service predicted to improve patient experience, outcomes and save £1.5M per annum in operational efficiencies.
  • Cadence and Partners – when this recruitment company reviewed how they support their clients to recruit Executives and non-Execs, they turned to Fearless Facilitator to help them build applicant case study scenarios to test applicant leadership capability and capacity to respond to complex operating environments and unanticipated challenges.
Policy Positioning
  • Novartis – improving care for people diagnosed with cancer requires a robust and well governed approach to collaborative working between pharmaceutical company Novartis and their partners across the NHS. We helped them unlock and understand shared approaches to risk in a way that helped them develop clear guidance and a position paper on collaboration.
  • Lymphoma Action – like most charities Lymphoma Action had difficult choices to make following the Covid 19 pandemic, with two thirds of the sector reporting loss of income and half having to change the way they offered services due to loss of resources. Our staff engagement process helped them establish together, which services to prioritise, which to pivot and which to pause.
  • NHS England – our founder facilitated the stakeholder process to align and agree a major redesign of the national Cancer Drugs Fund, working alongside senior policy advisors and technical experts in finance and health economics.
Responding To A Crisis
  • NHS England – we worked alongside Professor Amy Edmonson and NHS Horizons to design and deliver “A Practical Guide to the Art of Psychological Safety in the Real World of Health and Care”. This involved over 80 health, care and local government leaders, each with the ambition to develop psychological safety as an integral element of building capacity and capability into their organisations.
  • Pfizer – our founder facilitated the corporate response and operational readiness for this multinational bio-pharmaceutical company, in relation to the closure of a major research facility and its impact on the local economy.
  • We have offered discreet and effective bespoke consulting support that helps lead organisations out of crisis; for example, advising on and supporting the response and improvement planning in organisations found to be performing below mandatory quality standards.

Our Approach is direct, incisive, empathic, methodical, challenging, reflective and takes participants to the place they have either avoided or thought they could only dream of reaching together.

We help businesses build the tools and resilience they need to: improve team performance; solve an operational or business challenge; create a robust, consensus-driven position on an issue or policy; respond to a crisis.

Common Client Issues

Misalignment between mission, aim, objectives, strategy, and tactics:

This can be due to ignorance when, for whatever reason, people lack awareness of essential detail and context. This can cause avoidable complexity that compounds issues and creates unintended consequences.

When ‘fire-fighting’, people can forget the ‘whole organisation’ perspective and the wider dynamics needed for lasting team, business and policy improvement.

People tend to bottle up their feelings when they only feel personally invested in the problem(s) they see:

In a crisis, we are reactionary, not responsive and can lose sight of the original and broader goals and intentions. When perspectives are lost, we can develop a closed, siege mentality where we only seek to defend or prove our own particular position, rather than engage in a collective search for insight and answers.

A breakdown of trust and divided loyalties.

If we all develop a closed and defensive mindset, workplaces can quickly become polarised, leading to unhelpful behaviours like silence/ fear and deference at one end of the scale, to verbose/ domineering/ overbearing at the other.

Relationships often follow suit and become transactional, robotic and completely mistrusting between those with opposing points of view; or overly blasé, informal and familiar amongst people who are like-minded. In either scenario, the art of critical inquiry and objective challenge can be lost, raising the risk of complacency and a blinkered view of the challenges and changes needed. 

How we help clients overcome them

Active Listening:

  • Contributes to dialogue in a way that is candid about complexity and wider challenges and doesn’t shy away from difficult and necessary conversations.
  • Is inclusive about seeking out and learning from diverse and alternative opinions, particularly those we might not traditionally agree with.
  • Helps interpret and sense-check blocks and opposing views, by exploring perspectives, experiences and causes of contention.

Support & empower the lived experience of all, irrespective of hierarchy, by:

  • Respecting that adults have agency (that feeling of greater control over one’s own actions and consequences) and enabling everyone to realise and lean into the agency they have but might never have realised. 
  • Supporting them to own changes within their sphere of influence and to own the input they can have into areas beyond their control.

 

Practice & Experimentation

  • Throughout our work with a group, we identify where risk appetite and tolerance for failure varies and build plans that make allowances for this, so that everyone progresses towards the same goal in a way that works best for them.
  • Our programmes make sure participants put theory straight into practice, through a supported ‘course correct and remedy’ approach, where trial and error experimentation is encouraged via small, practical changes in real-life day to day working. 

The sessions have given us so much to think about and many tips and tools for us to use. Your ability to connect so readily with the team and your down to earth approach and delivery added real value.

Ruby Starheart

Office of the Data Protection Officer, Department for Education