Library of facilitation techniques

Asking listeners to summarize your presentation from time to time is a good technique for encouraging people to listen carefully, take notes, and to review the content. Best Summaries uses this basic concept.

When we are given a problem our reflex is to find answers. But it can be difficult to leave the comfort zone and to come up with creative answers. This exercise will encourage to think out of the box.

Creativity through pictures and images

Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming.

A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful.

This Pizza Game is a great way for new or established teams to understand the principles of Lean & Agile by diving into Kanban in a quick and fun way that is hard to communicate through words alone. It teaches you how to get from an existing process to a Kanban system, how to visualize the system, and start modifying it.

The Pizza Game enables the teams to have a hands-on experience feeling the pains, gains, frustrations, and fun throughout the process - and to reflect on improvements that the participants can share back in their workplace. Bonus: you get to make (paper or digital) Pizza!

Use Craig Raine's poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.

A powerful tool to gain deep insights in the structure of the ecosystem.

Each person describes how they are feeling in terms of a weather system.    

Arguments, presentations, strategies, or other plans are sent to other teams for deconstruction in order to find gaps or problems.

Individuals express their response to a statement or idea by standing closer or further from a central object. Used with teams to reveal system, hidden patterns, perspectives.