Library of facilitation techniques

A fun, dynamic game useful for introducing topics related to decision making, conflict resolution, win-win scenarios and the importance of clear communication of goals.

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.

Most people have a repertoire of song lyrics in their head. This activity offers the fun of recalling them, the opportunity to belt them out without anxiety about singing "well", and the aspect of learning which songs "everyone" in the group knows and which are familiar to only you.

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.

Problems that are vague or misunderstood have a harder time passing our internal tests of what matters and, as a result, go unaddressed and unsolved. Often, meetings that address problem-solving skip this critical step: defining the problem in a way that is not only clear but also compelling enough to make people care about solving it.

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.