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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Liberating Structures

Celebrity Interview

You can enable a large group of people to connect with a leader or an expert (the celebrity) as a person and grasp the nuances of how that person is approaching a challenge. With a well-designed interview, you can turn what would otherwise be a passive, often boring presentation into a personal narrative that is entertaining, imparts valuable knowledge, and reveals the full range of rational, emotional, and ethical/moral dynamics at play. You can often turn the interview into an invitation to action, drawing out all the elements needed to spark the participant group’s imagination and encourage cohesive action.

Liberating Structures

Nine Whys

With breathtaking simplicity, you can rapidly clarify for individuals and a group what is essentially important in their work. You can quickly reveal when a compelling purpose is missing in a gathering and avoid moving forward without clarity. When a group discovers an unambiguous shared purpose, more freedom and more responsibility are unleashed. You have laid the foundation for spreading and scaling innovations with fidelity.
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Liberating Structures

Critical Uncertainities

You can help a diverse group quickly test the viability of current strategies and build its capacity to respond quickly to future challenges. This Liberating Structure prepares a group for strategy making. It does not produce a plan to be implemented as designed but rather builds resilience: the capacity to actively shape the system and be prepared to respond to surprise. This means being better able to see different futures unfolding, better prepared to act in a distributed fashion, and more ready to absorb disruptions resiliently.

Thiagi Group

Decisions, Decisions…

When it comes to decision-making, why are some of us more prone to take risks while others are risk-averse? One explanation might be the way the decision and options were presented. 

This exercise, based on Kahneman and Tversky's classic study, illustrates how the framing effect influences our judgement and our ability to make decisions. The participants are divided into two groups. Both groups are presented with the same problem and two alternative programs for solving them. The two programs both have the same consequences but are presented differently. The debriefing discussion examines how the framing of the program impacted the participant's decision.

Liberating Structures

Heard, Seen, Respected (HSR)

You can foster the empathetic capacity of participants to “walk in the shoes” of others. Many situations do not have immediate answers or clear resolutions. Recognizing these situations and responding with empathy can improve the “cultural climate” and build trust among group members. HSR helps individuals learn to respond in ways that do not overpromise or overcontrol. It helps members of a group notice unwanted patterns and work together on shifting to more productive interactions. Participants experience the practice of more compassion and the benefits it engenders.
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Digital Society School

Emoji story

An Emoji story is a method to interpret collected data by translating it into a story. In the story, you leave out specific words that describe important and emotional concepts and change them for Emoji‘s.

To be used after having collected data of user behaviour, context and emotions.

Hyper Island

Project Point of Departure

This is a method for individuals and teams to define the structure, direction and first steps of a project. The individual or team works through a set of questions and documents the answers in a sharable digital format. This can either be a “living” document that develops with the project it can be left as just a clear and concise record of the starting-point.

Liberating Structures

Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)

DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices.

DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.

Thiagi Group

Group Development Stage Directions

Different teams receive envelopes labeled with the names of different stages in the development of a team. Participants brainstorm guidelines for facilitating a team at a specific stage, record the guidelines on a card, and place the card inside the appropriate envelope. Teams rotate the envelopes and generate guideline cards for other stages in the life cycle of a team. During the evaluation round, team members comparatively score the guideline cards generated by other teams.