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.
Triads is a structured sharing activity for identifying the advantages and disadvantages of an object (examples: iPad, chicken soup) or a process (examples: meditation, conflict management). It also enables the participants to leverage the advantages and to reduce the disadvantages.
To explore how it feels to be excluded—and to be excluding.
Here's what the three letters of the acronym stand for: constructive, immediate, and active. Whenever someone shares some news about positive things that happened to her, react constructively, immediately, and actively. This strengthens your relationship and makes both of you happy. To learn more about this approach, read the handout at the end of the game instructions.
Two teams separately prepare and act out the same basic roleplay. Other participants watch these role-plays, compare the two versions, and evaluate them.
I dread the moment when people ask me, “What do you do?” I don't know how to explain that I am a performance technologist, or an instructional designer, or a facilitator. So I cheat by saying that I am a trainer.
Here's an activity that helps you become more fluent in explaining what you do for a living.
This simulation game consists of six rounds of activity, each involving a different participant. A mini debriefing discussion is undertaken immediately after each round to identify the emotional impact of the type of goal statement used during the round and to relate the experience with workplace events. The final activity requires participants to apply their insights to the specification of work-related performance goals.
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.
This textra game incorporates these important facts:
It is easier to compare two different items at a time than to compare a larger number of items.
When we compare two items, we understand them at a deeper level.
You already know a lot about factors that increase and decrease people's trustworthiness. This is because ever since you were a baby, you have learned through experience who to trust and who to distrust. This activity asks you to think about six people and decide why you trust or distrust them.