Library of facilitation techniques

Idea Generation and Innovation Activities

Idea generation techniques to get your group into creative thinking mode and boost innovation. Help people to find new perspectives and build on the collective inspiration of your group.
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Liberating Structures

25/10 Crowd Sourcing

 You can help a large crowd generate and sort their bold ideas for action in 30 minutes or less! With 25/10 Crowd Sourcing, you can spread innovations “out and up” as everyone notices the patterns in what emerges. Though it is fun, fast, and casual, it is a serious and valid way to generate an uncensored set of bold ideas and then to tap the wisdom of the whole group to identify the top ten. Surprises are frequent!

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Thiagi Group

Five ideas

Five Ideas is an activity that encourages participants to go beyond what is good for their team or their department and work on cooperatively achieving common goals.

Teambuilding activities create high-performance teams whose members are extremely loyal to each other and to their team. Sometimes, however, the emphasis in teamwork results in reduced collaboration across teams. Similar problems occur when employees become so focused on their departmental goals that they ignore or downplay the strategic goals for the total organization.

Anja Ebers

The Thing from the Future

Help a group to time-travel and tap their imagination by fictional objects.
With tangible objects and the stories your participants make up w/ them you'll get so much richer inputs and context to inform joint visioning / strategizing:
The future doesn't look that far away when you can pick it off the shelf.

Gamestorming methods

Brainwriting

Some of the best ideas are compilations from multiple contributors. Brainwriting is a simple way to generate ideas, share them, and subsequently build on them within a group. Access to multiple hands, eyes, and minds can yield the most interesting results.

Gamestorming methods

3-12-3 Brainstorm

This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group.

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