GFM manual in French from Jim Campbell, ideas from other ICAs in Europe, and encouragement from friends and was ready.I designed a 3-part GFM training event: 2 days for Focused Conversation and Consensus, 2 days for action planning and 2 days for strategic planning. Graphics were used quite a lot to aid discussions about leadership styles and facilitation. The training was designed in such a way that all participants would have a chance to experience the method and role of facilitator.

The 1st training was conducted in December 2010, a 2-day program in a monastery in the center of Paris, with 5 participants, all coaches and trainers from the computer science sector. It was an interesting experience for me to conduct the training in French and I got a very encouraging result. All the participants liked the training and said they would like to continue with ToP. One of them hired me to do facilitation and training as a full-time job in her company. Since then, I have held 2 other training sessions and have others planned. ToP is getting to be known more and more and there are many possibilities ahead for using the methodology.

I don’t know what would have happened if I didn’t have help from all the ICA colleagues and friends that I met and talked to. The adventure of ToP and facilitation has commenced in France!

For upcoming training events in Paris, please visit: http://www.clt-services.com/offre/formation/facilitateur.html
LE Thi Lan Huong (Lan), trained in ToP in 2003 and IToP 2005, has conducted around 100 workshops, seminars, meetings and training sessions.     ToP News

LE Thi Lan Huong (Lan), trained in ToP in 2003 and IToP 2005, has conducted around 100 workshops, seminars, meetings and training sessions.

By Lan Huong

“There used to be an ICA in France”, someone told me when I arrived in Paris in 2006. I found no one, or more exactly, I found Teresa Rosa, who still has strong connection with ICAI but has not used ToP here because it’s difficult to introduce ICA methods in France. “Here, they prefer something “academic” but things are moving, you need to be patient, may be one day, the time will come,” she said.

I was disappointed but was convinced that “the day” would l come and that I needed to be ready when it did. For me, facilitation and ToP in particular can be used anywhere and in any culture; the hard thing is how to introduce it to people. But there was the question of language. Any facilitation, documents, training must be in French. How was I going to do that?

I decided to start with something else to learn more about the French language, culture and people and searched for help from all the ICAs around that I knew. I contacted ICA Europe, Jim Campbell in Brussels, and Mia and Michael in Berlin for advice and French translated documents. I began facilitating group meetings and annual events for companies in Paris. One big question for me was how I could go back to work fully as a facilitator and trainer. I thought that I needed to start with training.

At the end of October 2009, Mia and Michael came to Paris to facilitate an Open Space on Open Space. That gave me the opportunity to meet others interested in facilitation. It was a touching moment for me - the atmosphere of exchanges, sharing and the feeling that there is a growing need for facilitation in France. Things started moving.

With the help of Luc Bizeul, I conducted some workshops here and there to get to know people and to see how they would react to facilitation and ToP. I got very positive responses and thought the next step would be to conduct ToP training. I got a