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.
11 results
Hyper Island

Stinky Fish

A short activity to run early in a program focused on sharing fears, anxieties and uncertainties related to the program theme. The purpose is to create openness within a group. The stinky fish is a metaphor for "that thing that you carry around but don’t like to talk about; but the longer you hide it, the stinkier it gets." By putting stinky fish (fears and anxieties) on the table, participants begin to relate to each other, become more comfortable sharing, and identify a clear area for development and learning.

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Hyper Island

World Cafe

World Café is a simple yet powerful method, originated by Juanita Brown, for enabling meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that are relevant and important to them. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines. Participants then self-organize and explore a set of relevant topics or questions for conversation.

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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.

Thiagi Group

Participants from Hell

This is a structured sharing activity that enables us to explore techniques for handling participants who disrupt interactive training sessions. 


Different teams receive envelopes labeled with different types of disruptive participants. Participants brainstorm guidelines for handling disruptive behaviours, record the guidelines on a card, and place the card inside the envelope. 

Teams rotate the envelopes and generate guideline cards for handling other types of disruptive participants. During the evaluation round, team members review the guideline cards generated by other teams and identify the top five suggestions.

Hyper Island

Exploring Client Centricity

Client-centricity” (or “client-focus”) is an approach to business based on putting the client/customer at the center of an organization's philosophy, strategy, and operations. This exercise promotes collaborative exploration and reflection around an organization’s approach to its clients. Participants discuss and share positive experiences they have had as clients, and use this to define their approach to “client-centricity” as a group. They discuss different groups of clients based on needs, and explore how successfully the organization has met those needs in the past. The exercise ends with a prioritization of areas for improvement.

Hyper Island

90-Minute Prototypes

90-Minute Prototypes is a short and sweet prototyping workshop that challenges teams to build basic clickable app prototypes within 90 minutes. It’s easy to plan and run and demonstrates how rapidly an insight can be turned into a test-ready prototype. Use it to inspire your team to embrace a prototyping mindset.

Hyper Island

Take a Stand

This is a practical, dynamic and versatile method for groups to explore ideas and questions together. Something like a physical questionnaire; participants respond to questions by walking around the space and placing themselves on an imaginary line. This provides a starting point for reflection and discussion and brings teams together.

Hyper Island

Unintended Consequences

In this workshop groups examine the unintended consequences of new technologies and use those to inspire new potential business opportunities. It looks beyond the common understanding of new technologies, challenging participants to discover unexpected potential and how it might be harnessed. For instance, Instagram was created as a virtual photo album for smartphones, but through the human connection between the people who use it, it has the potential to affect something as deep as our grieving and healing process, as a recent example of this author’s daughter showed.

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.

Hyper Island

Systems Thinking: The Iceberg Model

Systems thinking is a way of approaching problems that asks how various elements within a system — which could be an ecosystem, an organization, or something more dispersed such as a supply chain — influence one another. Rather than reacting to individual problems that arise, a systems thinker will ask about relationships to other activities within the system, look for patterns over time, and seek root causes.

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