Library of facilitation techniques

Workshop activities to Analyse, Understand and Innovate

Tools and techniques to analyse and understand complex situations, to unleash creativity and to discover new insights. Make sure your group explores the situation at hand and all participants get a thorough understanding before moving on to make decisions.
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Hyper Island

User Day-parting

This exercise supports a user-centred approach to product and service innovation. Teams create an imaginary user (a persona), map out an average day in his or her life, and identify the challenges that he or she experiences. Teams then use this to brainstorm new products or services that could help with those challenges. Finally, sketches or prototypes of the best ideas are quickly developed presented back to for feedback.

Hyper Island

Critical Thinking Mindset

A critical thinking mindset supports people to reflect by using critical thinking questions when they discover and discuss new information. Critical thinking involves the evaluation of sources such as data, facts, media, stories, observable phenomenon, and research findings. Good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve a problem or to make a decision. Critical thinking skills are key to making better, and well-informed decisions.

Thiagi Group

Back to Back

This is an energetic improv game that can be used anytime during a training session. My favourite time to use it is at the end of a session for debriefing. Participants pair up and stand back-to-back. The facilitator asks a question. The participants turn around and face each other and take turns sharing their responses.
Thiagi Group

The Anchor Effect

This jolt demonstrates how the natural human tendency of becoming heavily attached to a starting value can influence our decision making.
The participants work with two different versions of the same questionnaire. One version asks a series of questions that provide low anchor values, while the other version provides high anchor values. The debriefing discussion examines how anchoring affects our decision making.

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Liberating Structures

Integrated-Autonomy

You can help a group move from either-or conflicts to both-and strategies and solutions. You can engage everyone in sharper strategic thinking, mutual understanding, and collaborative action by surfacing the advantage of being both more integrated and more autonomous. Attending to paradox will reveal opportunities for profound leaps in performance by addressing questions such as: What mix of integrative control and autonomous freedom will advance our purpose? Where do our needs for global fidelity and consistency meet the needs for local customization and creative adaptability? This makes it possible to avoid bipolar swings in strategy that are frequently experienced by many organizations.

Walt Disney Strategie

De Walt Disney Strategie stimuleert creatief denken bij het oplossen van complexe problemen.

Studenten worden gestimuleerd om een open en positieve houding aan te nemen om nieuwe en onconventionele ideeën te bedenken, en deze vervolgens om te zetten in gestructureerde, concrete plannen. 

Gamestorming methods

SQUID

When exploring an information space, it’s important for a group to know where they are at any given time. By using SQUID, a group charts out the territory as they go and can navigate accordingly. SQUID stands for Sequential Question and Insight Diagram.