Adaptive Facilitation Intensive – October 28-30
The Adaptive Facilitation intensive program will elevate your ability to lead powerful conversations, design high-impact experiences and facilitate in complex, adaptive environments. The program prepares you to guide groups with presence, agility, and intention — across sectors, settings, and cultures. It combines deep theoretical grounding with hands-on, real-world application. And it integrates live instruction, reflective practice, and design-based experimentation — all within a collaborative, high-trust cohort mode.
Program Description
Our hands-on, interactive, creative approach incorporates innovative technologies and combines systemic, strategic thinking with concrete tools. In this three-day, cohort experience drawing from Adaptive Leadership and Design Thinking theory, you will learn to use a concrete, iterative structure to design relevant, creative, and impactful facilitated experiences. The program equips you to:
- Craft design plans to best meet your participants’ needs
- Think and work politically before bringing people together
- Frame the facilitation experience to be purposeful and relevant, tackling the adaptive challenges the group faces
- Generate creative, inspiring modalities that advance the group’s work
- Experiment to ensure that you are on the right track before the actual facilitation
- Build self-awareness and grit to navigate inevitable pivots and unexpected moments of challenge while facilitating in real time
The Adaptive Facilitation program will help anyone who gathers people do so with increased purpose and efficacy.
Details
Program Dates: October 28-30, 2026
Program Days: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. (CDT/GMT-5)
Location: All sessions will be held at the Kansas Leadership Center, 325 E. Douglas Ave, Wichita, Kansas, 67202.
Deadline to register: October 14
Tuition fee: $2,495 + $5 non-refundable cost for workbook (provided day of program).
Have questions or want more information? Contact KLC Programs at programs@kansasleadershipcenter.org or 316.712.4950.
Who Should Attend?
- Alumni of other KLC intensive offerings
- Anyone who designs and leads meetings
- Mid- to senior-level leaders
- Coaches, consultants, and learning professionals
- Change agents working across teams, systems, or stakeholder groups
- Internal leaders responsible for convening strategy, visioning, or cross-functional collaboration
Learning Objectives
By the end of the program, participants will be able to:
- Design and lead gatherings that inspire, align, and produce results
- Navigate the political and systemic challenges surrounding meetings and gatherings
- Learn tools to create engaging, purposeful meetings and gatherings
- Adapt facilitation approaches to fit real-time group needs
- Apply structured design thinking and creative modalities
- Gain skills to set up groups to work through complex adaptive processes
About Our Teachers
Co-directors Rae Ringel and Maya Bernstein designed, launched and ran the Executive Certificate in Facilitation Program at Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. In their 10-year tenure, the program produced 350 alumni worldwide.
Maya Bernstein
Maya Bernstein is an educator and facilitator with more than two decades of experience teaching Adaptive Leadership and Design Thinking. She is Director of Leadership Education at Yeshivat Maharat, a women’s rabbinical school, where she designs seminars focused on systemic change, complex dialogue and strategy. She holds degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Sarah Lawrence and has published in Harvard Business Review and Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Rae Ringel
Rae Ringel is an organizational psychologist and executive coach with three decades of global experience working with businesses, NGOs, and government agencies. She received her master’s degree in organizational psychology from Columbia University and is an adjunct member of the faculty at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. She is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
A.J. Robinson Jr., Ph.D.
Alonford (A.J.) Robinson Jr., Ph.D., is founder and CEO of Symphonic Strategies™ Inc., advising leaders across sectors on collective action, strategy, and organizational learning. He has worked with federal agencies, global corporations, foundations, and nonprofits. A former faculty member at George Washington University and the University of Maryland, he holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and dual bachelor’s degrees from Stanford.
