Library of facilitation techniques

This is a very quick and impactful check-in for groups.

This is a well-known and simple ice-breaker, designed to get to know the other members of your team well, as well as practicing your own poker face!

This is a simple method to prioritize actions as part of an action planning workshop, after a list of actions has been generated.

Encourage creative thinking and getting to know each other better with a short round of 'time travel' questions to each of your participants.

Fun energiser to create energy and fun. Great to use after breaks such as lunch or coffee breaks.

Creative, fun, energizing exercise.

Try on a relentlessly positive, can-do attitude before tackling the big stuff. The proverb goes "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Practice the art of positive thinking to unlock creative ideas. Use this as a warm-up before brainstorming or to energize your team meetings.

Here's an interesting game that produces humorous results. Hidden behind the humor, however, is subtle provocation that forces participants to think deeply to justify some of the basic principles and assumptions related to the training topic.

Participants write “Why?” questions related to the training topic. Then each participant writes a response to someone else's “Why?” questions. The questions and answers get mixed up, producing incongruous results.

Personal Kanban is a tool for organizing your work to be more efficient and productive. It is based on agile methods and principles.

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.

The goal of this game is to map out the motivations and interactions among actors in a system. The actors, in this case, may be as small-scale as individuals who need to work together to accomplish a task, or as large-scale as organizations brought together for a long-term purpose. A give-and-take matrix is a useful diagnostic tool, and helps players explore how value flows through the group.

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.