Library of facilitation techniques

An ice-breaker activity that is fun for everyone.

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.

The Circle of Trust is a tool that can be used both individually and for groups. You can rate your circle of trust - think of your ‘inner circle’; work, school, or another group - to see how diverse the group of people you trust is.

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.

Use this model to support the group in making own decisions. Great if you want to stop complains and start implementation.

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.

Build personas of ideas, products or experiences.

Imagine your product is a person. What's its name? What would its ideal date night be? Does it prefer the beach or the woods? This exercise is a playful way to nail down the essence of your idea, product, or service. Use it in ideation or as a way to hone an existing concept.

Free open-source tool that allows you to simply type or scribe notes & immediately see them appear in a large flipchart image on your webcam within the meeting.

Most facilitators know the power of a flipchart to draw out, capture and recognise participant input. But flipcharts are not so easy to use in the online world.

Virtual Flipcharts plug this gap and provide an easy to use tool that will be very familiar to you and your team. It even looks like a physical flipchart.

During the conversation, you type or scribe (draw) things directly into a page on Powerpoint and they appear instantly on your virtual flipchart in your webcam window. This means that they can play a part in simple 'round-virtual-table' face to face discussion without the disruption of screen sharing.

Create as many pages as you need and move between them with a scroll of your mouse.

Furthermore, the content of the virtual flipchart pages can instantly be distributed via emails to everyone at the meeting, and/or it can be send as sticky-notes to any of the other tools and techniques you might be using (for grouping, sorting, voting, display, off-line work, syndicates etc.)

Use cases: Capture ideas in a brainstorm; Record different perspectives in a discussion; Put ideas into the parking lot; Sketch out an idea or explanation; Create simple tools (like SWOT) within it; ... basically, anything you would use a real flipchart for.