Working Genius Facilitation Practices for Australian Consultants

If you facilitate Working Genius with Australian consulting teams, start with the client's real work, not the assessment. Contract the outcome, protect the line between model and facilitation, let the group test its map against one live project, and leave with one named change plus a follow-up rhythm. That is where insight becomes useful practice.

Who this guide is for

This guide is for Australian consultants who use facilitation inside leadership consulting, coaching, team development, strategy work, professional development or organisational change. It is also useful for a consultant who has learned the Working Genius model and wants a session to change how a client works on Monday morning.

It is not a directory of facilitators, a substitute for Working Genius training or a promise that one workshop will repair a team. The aim is narrower: to give you a practical way to contract, design, facilitate and follow through on a Working Genius conversation.

I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's The Table Group. I work with executive teams, schools, boards, business owners and other groups in person and online, and my background is here. That experience informs the examples, but the fictional scenario later in this guide is not a client case and contains no claimed outcome.

The facilitation lens: model, method and role

Working Genius gives a team language for six types of work: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement and Tenacity. It also distinguishes a person's areas of genius, competency and frustration. The model was created by Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group, and the official workshop material presents it as practical work with a team, not simply a talk about personality.

That distinction matters for consultants. Working Genius is the model you are helping the group use. Facilitation is the process you design so the group can understand its work, make sense of what it sees and decide what to do.

The International Association of Facilitators treats process design, participation, useful outcomes, professional knowledge and self-awareness as core parts of credible facilitation. Its Core Competencies are a useful professional check on any model-led session.

The simplest test is this: if your slides disappeared, could the group still do useful thinking about its work? If the answer is no, you may be delivering content rather than facilitating a process. If the answer is yes, the model is doing its proper job as a shared lens.

1. Contract the outcome before you teach the model

Start with the client's decision, not with a request to "do Working Genius". That phrase can mean an introduction, an individual debrief, a leadership-team reset, a project diagnosis, a role conversation or a follow-up review. Those are different pieces of work and they need different designs.

Ask the sponsor to complete this sentence: "At the end of the session, the team will be able to..." A useful ending might be, "choose one change to the way we allocate work on the client transition project". A weak ending is, "understand the six types better". Understanding matters, but it is not yet a client outcome.

Then name what the session will not do. It will not decide a person's worth, diagnose a mental-health condition, remove a governance obligation or make a difficult performance conversation disappear. A clear boundary gives the group permission to use the model without asking it to carry more weight than it can.

The IAF Core Competencies put this in professional language: build the working partnership, diagnose the client need, agree roles and responsibilities, customise the process and define quality outcomes with the client. Your version can be plain English, but the discipline is the same.

2. Separate content authority from process authority

A consultant can know more about Working Genius than anyone in the room and still avoid becoming the person who decides what the group should think. The facilitator owns the container, the sequence, the questions, the time and the safety of the process. The client group owns its work, its evidence, its choices and the meaning of its decisions.

The IAF guidance on the Certified Professional Facilitator role makes this content and process distinction explicit. It describes facilitation as helping a group manage the information it already has, or can access, to reach a necessary result in a collaborative way. That does not mean you become passive. It means you explain when you are teaching the model, when you are guiding the process and when you are offering content expertise.

Use a short role statement at the start: "I will guide how we work through this. You know the client, the context and the decisions that need to be made. I will offer the Working Genius language, and I will name when I am moving from facilitation into advice." That one sentence lowers the risk of hidden influence.

This is especially useful when the consultant has a commercial interest in the next piece of work. The IAF Code of Ethics asks facilitators to acknowledge conflicts of interest, respect group autonomy, use methods responsibly and maintain confidentiality. Transparency is part of the intervention, not a footnote after it.

3. Design the room for the actual consulting context

Australian consulting work rarely arrives in one neat format. A team may be in one office, spread across several cities, balancing client delivery with internal work or meeting across different time zones. Do not make geography a theme unless it affects the process. Make it a design input.

For an in-person session, check the room, sight lines, wall space, privacy and movement before you build the agenda. A team map that nobody can see is not a team map in practice. For a virtual session, check the platform, camera expectations, shared-board access, breakout mechanics, chat use and the fallback if one person's connection fails. For a hybrid session, design around the remote participant first, because the people in the room already have more natural access to one another.

The IAF competency framework links process design to participant diversity, learning preferences, time, space, atmosphere and the needs of the client. That is a useful corrective to the idea that a standard slide deck is a standard workshop. The model may stay stable. The process should not.

Before the session, ask the sponsor for one current piece of work, one recent moment of friction and one outcome that would make the session worth the time. Ask each participant to complete the assessment individually before group discussion, then give them time to read their own result. The Working Genius implementation guide and workshop guide both support this move from preparation into application.

4. Move from profiles to one live piece of work

The profile conversation is often the easiest part of the session. People recognise themselves, laugh at a familiar frustration and start telling stories. That is useful energy, but it is not the finished work. Move to one live project before the room becomes satisfied with recognition alone.

Choose a project with enough substance to matter and enough safety to discuss. Map the work, not the people. Ask what the project needed first, what it needed next and what it needs now. Then ask who is naturally energised by each stage, who can contribute competently with support and where the work is relying on someone who is already depleted.

This approach keeps the model from becoming a personality label. A person can contribute outside their genius. The question is what the work costs them, what support is needed and whether the team has designed the handoff well. The Working Genius glossary is a useful reference when participants need the terms clarified without turning the session into a lecture.

Use one concrete decision question, such as: "What do we need to change about this project's next handoff?" A good answer will name the work, the owner, the support and the point at which the team will review whether the change helped. A vague answer such as "communicate better" is a signal to keep facilitating.

5. Facilitate tension without turning results into labels

Working Genius can make a difficult pattern easier to name, but it can also give a team new language for avoiding responsibility. "That is not my genius" can become a polite refusal. "You are a Tenacity person" can become a way to load invisible work onto one colleague. Your job is to catch the moment when a useful lens starts becoming a fixed identity.

Use language that describes the work in front of the team. Say, "This task is asking for Tenacity and it is currently sitting with someone who finds that work draining." Do not say, "You are not a Tenacity person, so you should not do it." Then ask what support, pairing, sequencing or role change would make the work sustainable.

When tension rises, slow down the interpretation. Ask what happened, what the group is assuming and what evidence would change its view. The IAF ethics guidance places weight on safety, equity, autonomy, confidentiality and the responsible use of methods. Those principles matter more when the room is uncomfortable, not less.

If the issue is actually unresolved conflict, a broken decision right, harassment, a capability concern or a governance problem, name that limit. Working Genius can provide a shared vocabulary, but it is not a replacement for the right intervention. A facilitator earns trust by refusing to use a helpful model as an answer to every problem.

6. Build explicit handoffs around the work sequence

A common facilitation mistake is to map the six types and then leave the map on the wall. The practical value appears at the transitions: from possibility to evaluation, from decision to mobilisation, from mobilisation to support and from support to completion.

At each transition, ask four questions. What is the work changing into? Who is invited to lead that next stage?

What does the person or group need from the previous stage? What is the visible signal that the handoff is complete? This turns an attractive diagram into an operating agreement.

For example, an idea is not ready for mobilisation merely because the room likes it. It needs a discernment step that tests fit, risk and feasibility.

A decision is not ready for execution merely because someone said yes. It needs a clear owner, a support path and a definition of done. The steps after Working Genius guide makes a similar case for naming the stage of work and designing handoffs deliberately.

Make the handoff visible in the client's existing system. It might be a line in a project brief, a standing agenda question, a column in a task board or a sentence in a decision log. Choose the lightest tool that will still be seen when the consultant leaves.

7. Close with a 30-day operating rhythm

End the session with less than you think. One change that is owned is more useful than seven intentions that nobody can remember. Ask each participant to name one behaviour they will try, one person they need to involve and one date on which the team will review what happened.

The review should use the same live work whenever possible. Ask what changed, what became easier, what became visible and where the team still has a gap. If the map is not being used, do not run another explanation of the model. Find the point in the workflow where the language stopped helping and redesign that point.

The Working Genius implementation guide recommends connecting the model to current projects, naming commitments and building practice over time. The official Working Genius workshop page also frames the work as a way to create a healthier rhythm, not merely a memorable session.

The Working Genius facilitation loop

The following is a practical synthesis for consultants. It is not an official Working Genius framework, a certification standard or a measured intervention. It is a compact way to remember the decisions a facilitator needs to make around the model.

Contract.

Name the client problem, desired outcome and boundary. You know the contract is clear when the sponsor can say what will be different after the session. If the request is still "do Working Genius" with no decision attached, keep contracting.

Frame.

Explain the model and your process role. Participants should know what the six types mean and who owns the content. If the facilitator is interpreting every person, the model has become a performance by the consultant.

Map.

Put the team or project in view. The sign of movement is that the group can see a real work gap or handoff. If the map becomes a personality display with no current work attached, return to the project.

Apply.

Test one live project or decision. The group should name a change to work, role, meeting or handoff. If the conversation stays at recognition and storytelling, ask what the client will do differently next.

Hand off.

Assign the next stage, support and definition of done. A named owner and visible next step should exist before the session closes. If everyone agrees in the room but nobody knows what happens next, the handoff is incomplete.

Embed.

Set a review date and a simple question. The team should revisit the change in its normal rhythm. If the workshop is filed away as a finished event, the facilitation has stopped before the application begins.

The loop is intentionally small. It helps a consultant protect the session from two opposite failures: turning the model into a lecture, or turning the room into a loose conversation with no client result.

Worked example: a fictional Australian consultancy

This is a fictional example, not a client case. Imagine an eight-person Australian consultancy with a hybrid team. The partners say their people generate strong ideas in planning meetings, but decisions are reopened and project follow-through depends on the same two people. The sponsor wants a 120-minute Working Genius session.

The starting inputs are a team map, one live client-transition project, a recent example of a decision being reopened and no shared definition of done. The facilitator contracts one outcome: by the end of the session, the team will agree one change to the next transition handoff and a date to review it.

The first design choice is to keep the model explanation short. The second is to map the current project rather than discuss abstract strengths. The third is to ask where the transition from decision to action is failing. The team identifies that the decision is recorded, but the person expected to mobilise the work is not given a clear support path or authority to resolve the first obstacle.

The facilitator then asks the group to design the handoff. One person owns mobilisation, one person is invited to provide practical support, and the team defines done as a brief written plan accepted by the project lead. The group puts a 30-day review in its existing meeting rhythm and agrees to ask whether the new handoff reduced rework.

The result is a usable session plan and a testable operating change. It is not proof that the consultancy will perform better, and it does not prove that Working Genius caused any later result. The limitation is important: a fictional example shows how to reason through the method, not what will happen for a real client.

Strongest counterargument and limitations

The strongest counterargument is that a consultant should stay completely neutral and never bring a model into a client conversation. There is truth in the warning. If the consultant uses Working Genius to steer the group toward a preferred answer, the process has become disguised advice.

The answer is not to pretend the consultant has no influence. Choosing the model, the questions, the sequence and the time limits already shapes the conversation. The answer is to make that influence visible, contract it with the client and keep the group's content authority intact. The IAF Code of Ethics describes facilitation as stewardship of process and impartiality toward content, which is a more useful standard than pretending to be invisible.

This guide may not apply when the client has not agreed on the problem, when senior leaders are using the session to avoid a necessary decision, when participants cannot speak safely or when the work needs specialist technical advice rather than group process. It also needs adaptation for teams with accessibility, privacy, cultural or technology requirements that a standard workshop design does not meet.

The evidence is bounded. The model definitions and facilitation principles are supported by the sources below, while the loop and worked example are a practical synthesis. No outcome, productivity lift, client satisfaction score or commercial result is claimed for this page.

A 10-minute next action

Before your next Working Genius session, set a timer for 10 minutes and write three sentences. First: "At the end of this session, the client will be able to..." Second: "The live piece of work we will use is..." Third: "We will review the change on..."

If you cannot complete the three sentences, the design is not ready yet.

Then add one boundary sentence: "I will guide the process, while the group owns the content and decision." That small preparation move will usually improve the session more than adding another slide about the six types.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use Working Genius if I am not a certified facilitator?

You can learn the model and use its language responsibly, but you should describe your role accurately and avoid implying a credential you do not hold. If a client expects a formal Working Genius workshop, use the current official pathway or work with an appropriately trained facilitator. The official Working Genius workshop page explains the role of its Master Facilitators, while the IAF competency framework is a useful broader check on facilitation practice.

Does a facilitator need to stay neutral about everything?

No. You can be clear about the process, teach the model and name a pattern you observe. You should distinguish observation from advice, state when your role changes and leave the client's content decisions with the group.

Neutrality is not silence. It is disciplined care about how your influence affects the result.

How should I adapt a Working Genius session for a hybrid team?

Design around the remote participant first. Use one shared visual space, make verbal and written participation equally real, avoid side conversations in the room and agree what happens if a person loses connection. Keep the focus on the client's work and the session outcome, not on making the technology look impressive.

How do I stop the model becoming a label?

Talk about the work before you talk about the person. Use phrases such as "this task is asking for" and "this is currently draining" rather than treating a genius or frustration as a permanent identity. Keep returning to contribution, support, choice and the team's responsibility to design a workable handoff.

About the author and corrections

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, keynote speaker, leadership consultant and author. The sources and links in this guide were checked on 31 July 2026.

If you find a factual error, an outdated link or a problem with the way a source is represented, send the correction to jonno@consultclarity.org with the page title and the passage that needs attention.

Sources

Working Genius Team Workshop, official Working Genius. Used for the workshop's practical team orientation and the role of a Working Genius Master Facilitator.

IAF Core Competencies. Used for client contracting, process design, participation, inclusion, outcomes and professional practice.

IAF Statement of Values and Code of Ethics. Used for autonomy, responsible methods, safety, confidentiality, conflict of interest and stewardship of process.

IAF Certified Professional Facilitator. Used for the content and process distinction.

Working Genius implementation guide. Used for assessment preparation, team mapping, live-work application and follow-through.

How to run a Working Genius workshop. Used for purpose, context, pre-work and psychological safety considerations.

Steps after Working Genius. Used for meeting-stage language, explicit handoffs and post-session application.

Working Genius glossary. Used for the six types and genius, competency and frustration language.

Jonno White: Certified Working Genius Facilitator (Australia). Used for the first-person credential and Australian facilitation context.

Next read

If you need a full session run sheet, read how to run a Working Genius workshop. If the session is complete and you need an application plan, read the Working Genius implementation guide.

If you want to explore a Working Genius session for your own team, read about Jonno White's Working Genius facilitation in Australia or email jonno@consultclarity.org with the team size, the work problem and the result you need. There is no pressure to take that next step.