SPONSOR For This Conference	The Facilities for the 33rd Midwest Facilitation Conference are provided by McDonald's Corporation at Hamburger University, 2715 Jorie Boulevard, Oak Brook, Illinois 60523 http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/career/hamburger_university.html
SPONSOR: Nightingale Conant	Since 1993, Nightingale-Conant (Niles, Illinois) has been a most significant contributing sponsor to MFN providing the vast majority of door prizes. Nightingale-Conant is the largest producer and distributor of instructional and motivational audio and video tapes for Personal and Business Development, Wealth Building, Sales, Mind Technology, Health & Wellness and Spiritual Growth. Nightingale-Conant also provides Coaching Services and has a full-service Speakers' Bureau. Please visit their website at: http://www.nightingale.com
SPONSOR: University Associates	Since 1993, University Associates, has been another significant sponsor and supporter of MFN activities, providing products and a number of high-value door prizes, such as tuition-free seats in their workshops. Please visit their website at: http://www.universityassociates.com
Conference Fees	$99.00 per participant on or before January 19th (Early Registration Discount) $119.00 per participant after January 19th $119.00 per participant at the door (no guarantee of availability) Now accepting all major credit cards: (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover/Novus, Diner's Club) Fee includes Conference, Materials, Continental Breakfast & Lunch.  Fee Does NOT include Lodging (see suggestions below). Cancellations after January 19th or no shows may be assessed a cancellation fee
5 Ways to Register	Click Here to go to Registration Information Page Phone: (773)-463-2288 - During the recording press the "2" key. Please announce 'MFN Conference Registration', your company name, and the name, phone # and payment information of each registrant. Fax: (773)-463-9322 - Fax completed registration form with payment information for each registrant. E-Mail: register@midwest-facilitators.net - E-mail completed registration form with payment information and subject: 'MFN Conference Registration'. Snail-mail: Mail completed registration form with payment information to: MFN c/o Jordan-Webb, 2656 W Montrose Ave,  Suite 110, Chicago, IL 60618. On-Site: Registration and payment ($119.00) on-site is subject to availability. No guarantee without pre-registration.
On-Line Information	Chicago, IL Information Websites: Weather Information - http://www.weather.com/weather/local/60601 City of Chicago - http://www.cityofchicago.org  or  http://www.ci.chi.il.us City Search for Chicago - http://www.chicago.citysearch.com  World Web Travel Guide - http://www.chicago.worldweb.com Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau - http://www.choosechicago.com All About Chicago - http://www.allabout-chicago.com AreaGuides.Net - http://chicago.areaguides.net Chicago Tribune - http://www.chicagotribune.com Chicago Sun-Times - http://www.suntimes.com Chicago Reader - http://www.chireader.com Navy Pier - http://www.navypier.com Wendella Boat Rides - http://www.wendellaboats.com Mercury Boat Cruises - http://centerstage.net/other/mercury-boat-cruises.html Daily Herald - http://www.dailyherald.com Chicago Public Library - http://cpl.lib.uic.edu Fun Places to Go With Kids - http://www.FunPlacesToGoWithKids.com Ken Schessler's America/Chicago Tours - http://members.aol.com/KSchessler/wizzk.html Palmer's Walking Guide - http://www.palmersguide.com/chicago Sears Tower - http://www.searstower.com Museum of Science & Industry - http://www.msichicago.org Field Museum of Natural History - http://www.fmnh.org Shedd Aquarium - http://www.sheddnet.org Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum - http://www.adlerplanetarium.org Art Institute of Chicago - http://www.artic.edu Museum of Contemporary Art - http://www.mcachicago.org Chicago Historical Society - http://www.chicagohs.org Chicago Children's Museum - http://www.chichildrensmuseum.org Morton Arboretum - http://www.mortonarb.org Chicago Botanic Garden - http://www.chicago-botanic.org Chicago Architecture - http://www.yelodog.com Chicago's Greektown - http://www.chicagosgreektown.com Chicago's Chinatown - http://www.chicagochinatown.net Musicals - http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Performing_Arts/Theater/Musicals/Shows/Chicago Theater - http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/Illinois/Cities/Chicago/Entertainment_and_Arts/Theater Chicago White Sox - http://chicago.whitesox.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/cws/homepage/cws_homepage.jsp Chicago Cubs - http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/chc/homepage/chc_homepage.jsp
Meals	Continental breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack are included in the Conference fee.  Participants with special dietary needs contact David De Witt: david.dewitt@dsc-logistics.com
Dress Code	Business Casual.

Friday, January 23, 2004

Looking to shake up your meetings? Trying to find a way to keep your sessions energetic and vibrant? This workshop will explore the importance environment plays in eliciting more from participants and employees and how environment can make or break a meeting. We will discuss how each of the five senses can be engaged throughout the meeting in such a way that the participant is more invested in the meeting and its results. We will arm you with tools and ideas for transforming even the most boring, staid hotel conference room into a space that will exponentially increase the results of each and every meeting you facilitate. In the second portion of the workshop, we will talk about how to maintain the momentum of the environment you've created and keep your participants engaged every step of the way. We will explore the power of icebreaker, energizer and creativity exercises and go through a range of examples. And to make sure that you feel comfortable adding them to your repertoire, we'll practice them in the session and have some fun.

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Eva Niewiadomski (Catalyst Ranch) Chicago, Illinois http://www.catalystranch.com (back to agenda)

Eva Niewiadomski is owner and founder of Catalyst Ranch, an innovative meeting space in downtown Chicago, located in historic Haymarket Square. The environment at Catalyst Ranch is unlike any other conference center - it is colorful, eclectic, filled with retro furniture, windows, toys, artwork, books, an electronic organ, boas, essential AV equipment and lots more to boot. Prior to opening her own business, Eva worked for fifteen years for Quaker Oats, most recently in marketing and new product development. It was in that capacity that she trained as a facilitator and designed and led multitudes of new product, naming and promotion development brainstorming sessions. And, in her spare time, she also created a couple of Innovation Hallways and a Creativity Room for the divisions she was working for at the time. Those were the precursors for Catalyst Ranch. Eva has an MBA from Kellogg in Marketing and International Business. In her previous incarnations she was a CPA and a financial analyst, but she really doesn't like to talk about that deeply buried history. Some of Catalyst Ranch's loyals clients include U.S. Cellular, Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co, Unilever Home & Personal Care, Heartland Alliance, Quaker Foods & Beverages, Motorola, Supergroup®, Think Shop, Russell Williams Group and Customer Evangelists.

For more information visit: http://www.catalystranch.com 

Regardless of our job title, we negotiate every single day. We negotiate with our clients, suppliers, peers, bosses, spouses and kids. How well we do in these everyday negotiations can not only determine the outcomes but also affect long-term relationships and our personal sense of self-worth. This two-hour session will engage the participants in a negotiating exercise where their very survival is a stake. The debrief will investigate the motives and approaches that each group used in the role-play and look for approaches, attitude and skills necessary to reach a mutually agreeable outcome. 

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Bob Lapin (Zehren Friedman Associates) Riverwoods, Illinois http://www.zehrenfriedman.com (back to agenda)

Bob Lapin has 25 years of experience in management, training and consulting. His formal education was in food microbiology, and he holds a M.S. degree in Food Science. His work experience began with the FDA before moving to the food industry. He held progressively more responsible quality assurance positions at General Mills and Quaker Oats, and was Director of Quality Assurance for Anderson Clayton Foods. Building upon his corporate Quality Management experience, Bob began his consulting career in 1983 when he joined Philip Crosby Associates, a worldwide quality management-consulting firm. He established their U.K office and lived in London in the late 1980's. Prior to joining Zehren Friedman Associates, he was principal of his own independent consulting practice.

Zehren Friedman Associates is a Chicago based consulting and training company that helps clients improve results through the art and science of persuasion. Their highly interactive workshops include: · Presentation Skills - the ability to stand before a group of people, look each person in the eye and make a persuasive presentation; · Selling Skills - the ability to ask good questions, listen intently and offer solutions that truly meet the client's needs · Negotiating Skills - the ability to reach agreement either by judicious sharing of available resources or through a truly collaborative approach that doesn't depend on the resources originally available, but "looks outside the box" for a truly creative solution · Internal Consulting Skills - "contracting" with internal managers or departments to deliver specialized services and advice where the internal consultant has no line authority but shares responsibility for results.

For more information visit: http://www.zehrenfriedman.com

The core responsibility of a facilitator is to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable participating. Our job is to get all ideas on the table and all voices heard. One of the ways we do this is by maintaining neutrality regarding the session topic. We are not, however, as mindful of maintaining style neutrality when facilitating. Our natural tendency is to design and facilitate a session that is comfortable for people who are basically like ourselves. This gives an disadvantage to session participants who are dissimilar to us in style of expression. This lack of style neutrality can be a barrier to our core responsibility of creating and maintaining that safe environment.

In this workshop session we will use Social Styles as a tool to help us better understand ourselves, better understand our facilitation audience, and guide us in adjusting our style to meet the needs of the audience in front of us rather than an audience of people like ourselves. No matter what your facilitation skill level, this highly interactive session will give you a new twist on which facilitation skills to use and when to use them.

Learner Objectives: As a result of attending this presentation, participants will be able to:

• Identify key social-style patterns and understand their implication for facilitation
• Consider how their own style may get in the way of their facilitation
• Design facilitation processes that meet the needs of a diverse audience
• Identify which processes work better for which styles
• Apply facilitation processes that work well for getting all voices heard and all ideas on the table.

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by Cathy Alper (C Results) Thiensvillle, Wisconsin http://www.leadstrat.com (back to agenda)

Cathy Alper, M.A. is the owner of C Results, a consulting company that specializes in team coaching: helping business teams go from good to great. She is an employee/organization development professional who uses consulting, training, leadership development, coaching, and facilitation to help people work well together to achieve business results. She works with companies on board retreats, project team assurance, team/department breakthrough, leadership team effectiveness, new team launching, inter-team/department communication, and team/department renewal.

She is a contributing author to the 2004 Pfieffer Training Annual, a Senior Manager with Leadership Strategies, and a past Southeast Wisconsin ASTD Board Vice President. She is certified presenter of numerous training programs including Social Styles, Cahners Tracom, and Effective Facilitation, Leadership Strategies.

Cathy will be presenting Leadership Strategies flagship course, The Effective Facilitator in the Chicago area in March, June, September and December. She will also be presenting a course on facilitating IT sessions for IT in March and September.

For more information visit: http://www.leadstrat.com

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With discontinuities, disruptions, and outliers occurring more frequently than in the past, facilitators may find it useful to supplement traditional planning methods with a disciplined approach to forecasting future conditions. The legendary futurist Peter Bernstein has emphasized the need to pay more attention to three to four outliers. He states, "The gist of my thesis is that all of us . . . depend far too much on measures of central tendency and therefore are mesmerized by the hole rather than the donut." This workshop is designed to instruct facilitators about the value and approaches to scenario planning. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Learn why plans have less value than the process of planning. Contribute your own insight and experience towards understanding how planning processes support decision-making processes. Participate with a sub-team toward building a future scenario and identifying dimensions and outliers that could impact planning and prioritization for you and your clients.

The workshop involves two phases. The first phase provides for an interactive forum to build understanding about methodological considerations. The second phase allows for hands-on development by sub-teams, whom will come together to share disparate scenarios. Time-permitting, additional discussion and evaluation of the scenarios will provide a forum for key learnings about the importance of identifying dimensions, economic interests, and outliers that affect decision-making. Some of the primary topics that will be presented and discussed include:

• Purpose and value of planning processes
• Using scenarios to augment the planning process
• Methodological approaches and options
• Preparatory considerations
• Defining the planning horizon and scope
• Identifying economic interests and uncertainties
• Toggling variables to configure alternative scenarios
• Synthesizing - identifying themes, labeling, and comparing scenarios
• Testing for plausibility and internal consistency
• Developing options and strategies
• Testing strategy(ies) for portability and impact

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by Terrence Metz (Morgan Madison & Company) Oak Brook, Illinois http://www.morganmadison.com (back to agenda)

Terrence Metz is a founding partner and Senior Vice President at Morgan Madison & Company, a consultancy focused on market development and idea management processes for service, manufacturing, and technology companies. He has developed a proprietary consensus building method that helps client teams quickly build on-time deliverables. He serves as the lead business consultant and project manager for a broad range of engagements. Typical engagements include strategic development, business planning, problem-solving, continuous improvement, organizational design, process design, and customer cognitivity workshops. With over 20 years of experience across many industries, he has completed in-depth work for a broad range of commercial, industrial, and institutional clients. Mr. Metz has assisted dozens of companies with their future planning models by providing research, planning, and implementation support; both one-on-one and in workshop environments. Mr. Metz has served organizations such as 3M Company, Americas-Global, Abbott Laboratories, Excelon, Glencoe Capital, R. R. Donnelley, Siemens A.G., and Westinghouse. Terrence was awarded his undergraduate degree and MBA from Northwestern University. He also has work experience in strategic development and profit and loss management from Honeywell, Invensys, and Tripp Lite. Currently, Terrence is on the board of directors Product Development and Management Association (Wisconsin Chapter). He is a (Motorola) Six Sigma Green Belt quality expert and a long-time member of the World Future Society, International Association of Facilitators, and Midwest Facilitators Network. He is also an editor and contributor to two books: o Editor and contributor (2000): A Process for Deciding by Gary Rush o Editor and contributor (2003): FAST Session Leader by Gary Rush

For more information visit: http://www.morganmadison.com

• Gain a deeper experience of how the emotional content of communication profoundly affects meaning
• Learn and experiment with a communication model for addressing difficult situations with respect and well-being
• Work with an inquiry tool to guide planning for effective, tough conversations
• Discuss effective approaches for addressing group and one-on-one issues

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by Jackie Sloane (Sloane Communications) Chicago, Illinois (back to agenda)