Library of facilitation techniques

Empowerment Workshop Activities

22 results
FRANCOIS FAVIER

Fist to five

Fist to Five is quality voting. It has the elements of consensus built in and can prepare groups to transition into consensus if they wish. Most people are accustomed to the simplicity of “yes” and “no” voting rather than the complex and more community-oriented consensus method of decision making. Fist to Five introduces the element of the quality of the “yes.” A fist is a “no” and any number of fingers is a “yes,” with an indication of how good a “yes” it is. This moves a group away from quantity voting to quality voting, which is considerably more informative. Fist to Five can also be used during consensus decision making as a way to check the “sense of the group,” or to check the quality of the consensus.
1

SCRUM: Agile Methods to empower teams

Many routines, methods, practices coming from the world of Agile can be applied in any project, bringing benefits to teams and customers. Note that it shall be done respecting agile value and mindset (collaboration, team spirit, self organisation, customer focus, responsibility,...). Here are few examples you could consider:

Run your activities in sprints of one month, and plan sprint ceremonies to review what has been done, spend some time to improve the way you work ( see practices related to team improvement), and plan your next activities depending on changes and new priorities.Use extensively Visual Management for the team to control what they do. Even if you don’t run sprints, propose regularly some retrospective, some time to reflect on how the team works and how to improve. Define priorities, the 'what’ and let the team self organize and decide the 'how’Let the team contributes to the estimation of the workload (see planning poker practice). Contact the Agile community for further help: https://hub.airbus.com/transformation/ls/community/agile

The garden of practices

What about using a bit of poetry? Imagine you and your team members as gardeners, and the team ways of working as your garden.

Plant a garden and use practices as seeds that you can put in your seed stock. Use a virtual (iKanban, wekan, Trello) or physical (post-its) Kanban tool to materialize this process. And when your garden is flourished, be proud of it and show it to your colleagues.

Detlef Forbrich

Empty Chair

A simple practice to listen in to an organization’s purpose consists of allocating an empty chair at any meeting to represent the organization and its evolutionary purpose. Anybody participating in the meeting can, at any time, change seats, to listen to and become the voice of the organization.

Collaboration Tools

If you use Google Documents (slide, sheet, chat ...) on a shared drive, everybody has the same information at the same time. Modifications are easily notified for all. It then reduces massively the number of exchanges through emails. You just share the link. Use it as a very collaborative tool: ask people for their opinion by letting them to comment the document to really use the collective intelligence.

It is also a good way to capitalise knowledge and for example introduce a new team member. You can also check this Airbus Community: https://sites.google.com/airbus.com/collaborationmadeawesome/home?pli=1