Decision Making & Goal Setting Workshop Activities

You can use Whispers as a follow-up activity to any interesting experience among a group of friends. It's my favorite game to informally debrief my colleagues at the airport or during the drive back after a conference.

n a reflective teamwork activity (RTA), the process and the content merge with each other. Participants work through an activity and use the outcomes to evaluate the process they used. Here's an RTA that explores challenges associated with losing and gaining team members in the midst of a project.

In a brain-pick activity, participants interview people who share a common experience or background. (These people are called informants.) Participants interact with these informants—and with each other—to collect and organize useful information.

This activity uses people who have undergone major organizational changes. Participants interview them to come up with a list of guidelines for coping with change.

A fun and reliable technique for scoring many ideas, with instant visual results. Participants rate statements by dropping tokens in Feedback Frames in a range of slots that are hidden by a cover, with results later revealed as a visual graph of opinions. This simple in-person analog tool uses secret score voting to recognize nuanced gradients of agreement towards consensus and avoid traditional voting problems such as groupthink and vote-splitting, which are common in sticker dot voting.

The game enables participants to get to know each other and have fun at the same time. Also since it takes a lot of moving it can be used as an energiser too.

A funny way to get to know each other especially in groups of children or teenagers.

Offers insights into the needs that different team members have for information and detail, how people like to work in either a structured or unstructured approach to problem solving and change, and how quickly and slowly people are willing to move ahead with a plan based on how much they know and understand about the solution.

Textra Games combine the effective organization of well-written documents with the motivational impact of training games. Participants read a handout, booklet, reprint, or a chapter in a book and play a game that uses peer pressure and peer support to encourage the recall and transfer of what they read.

Here is a fast-paced textra game for reviewing training content from product-knowledge booklets or technical reference manuals.

Rythm Instruments is a fun way to break the ice in groups, helping each participant to feel involved and create something from "scratch".

The 'warm seat' generates ideas for action points for the seated person.

Unlike the 'hot seat' where individuals are put on the spot and face questions from others, the 'warm seat' is a comfortable seat from which the seated person asks the questions. The most important feature of this reviewing method is that the seated person is in control: if they feel 'too hot', 'too cold' or in any way uncomfortable, they leave the seat to stop whatever is being said.

Putting review points into your meeting helps to ensure not only that it stays on track, but that people share ownership for the outcomes. Review points are very quick and simple, but can have a big impact on your success.