Purpose-driven meeting design and facilitation is a core competency of the Center of Excellence for Children’s Behavioral Health and staff receive training in the concept of Whole Scale^© meeting design that engages people — representing organizations and communities — to achieve rapid, significant, and lasting change through a whole-system approach.

This approach to meeting design and facilitation permeates all of the centers’ projects, but the Center of Excellence has specifically used this method to engage stakeholders in developing a strategic plan and implementation strategy for the behavioral health system of care in Georgia.

For stakeholder engagement to be most effective, meetings rely on adult learning principles to accommodate diverse learning styles and maximize information exchange, as well as conversational capacity best practices.

Other pillars of the center’s whole-system meeting design process include:

• Creating the right environment to have important conversations
• Providing relevant, objective information
• Building and valuing relationships
• Respecting the time of attendees through tight meeting facilitation