FOCUS ON TRAINING – Community Leadership Training

By the Campus AFD and the DCV team

With the “Training Focus” series, we are pleased to share a detailed presentation of a Campus AFD course using a joint interview format involving both the course designers and a learner. 

Experimentation and collective intelligence are on the menu of a new Community Leadership Training programme. It is offered by the Campus Afd and will be open to everyone starting in July 2024. 

This three-day training course offers leaders of communities or complex governance projects helpful methods for managing a collective dynamic as well as a range of tools for mobilising collective intelligence. The next session will be open to a mixed audience of AFD staff and partners.

Evelyne, Domitille, and Sara present this initiative.

Evelyne, you took part in the first session of this course. Have you been able to put into practice what you learned there?

Evelyne Chamaille, Head of Payment Control in the Risk Department: At our meeting at the beginning of the year, our director wanted to encourage collective participation in the preparation of our 2024 roadmap.

It was the perfect opportunity to put into practice the collective intelligence techniques we had experimented with at the Campus AFD and to set up a mini-training course in-house for people at the management level. We avoided the PowerPoint presentation format, which makes participants feel passive.

Above all, we prepared a programme of workshops that we had tested druing the training. These encourage everyone to contribute and allows us to share time that is both fun and creative.

Among other things, we experimented with the World Café* technique and had a Co-Dev* session, which are formats that mobilise colleagues in small groups and encourage them to adopt a consultative approach to a third party’s problem and help them to resolve it. For the creative touch, we made a coat of arms for the Risk Department, featuring our department’s assets and values. The team was delighted with this format, and the momentum generated by the seminar continues to this day.

What advice do you have for setting up this type of activity?

Domitille de Buttet, Project Manager for  Community Animation at Campus AFD: Before convening a seminar or team meeting, it is essential to define intentions so the resulting tools and activities are aligned with the objectives that have been set. It’s also important for us to remember that creating a community should not be an objective in itself, but a means of achieving an (ideally) collectively defined objective.

Evelyne: Right from the beginning, we listed the rules and expectations that everyone wanted to have for the seminar. For example, several of us asked for individual time between group activities and a break from day-to-day business so that we could concentrate on the workshops. Thanks to the training, we had clear instructions and objectives, and that was important for us because it helped to set a clear direction.

How does the Campus AFD support communities after the training programme is finished?

Sara Crocco, Project Manager for  Community Animation at Campus AFD: Depending on the resources and objectives (raison d’être and mission) that the community has set itself, we support colleagues in setting up routines and activities so that members can get together, continue to train, take part in webinars, and promote their activities, both individually and collectively. For example, for MODEV (Note: the historic training course that the Campus AFD has offered since 1963) we offer “Back To MODEV”, which lasts four days in Marseille, to help the community’s ambassadors strengthen the collective intelligence dynamics.

How can the positive momentum be maintained over the long term?

Evelyne: We’ve held specific meetings covering each of our projects and we’ve just created an internal community on our LaRuche sharing space. This space allows us to track our various activities using  a visual management style. We display this at team meetings to get an overview of the situation of our worksites! It’s very valuable in terms of mobilising people internally.

*World Café: The World Café aims to analyse the different facets of a subject. Participants are seated around tables in groups of four. Each table presents one dimension of a subject. Participants then have to translate their group thoughts into drawings or ideas. Every 20 to 30 minutes, participants move from one table to another, leaving their thoughts on the table.

*Co-dev: Co-development is an innovative training approach that brings together a group of people facing the same professional issues. This format uses collective intelligence to find solutions to common problems by listening to each of the participants and hearing about their real-world experiences.