Library of facilitation techniques

Remote Workshop Activities

Activities suitable for virtual and online workshops and meetings. Get your remote meetings engaging and productive with tools and techniques that foster participation and get everyone contributing.
212 results
Gamestorming methods

How-Now-Wow Matrix

When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’.

The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters.

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Hyper Island

Team Purpose & Culture

This is an essential process designed to help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose). Defining these two things will help any team to be more focused and aligned. With support of tangible examples from other companies, the team members work as individuals and a group to codify the way they work together. The goal is a visual manifestation of both the purpose and culture that can be put up in the team's work space.

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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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Leigh Ann Rodgers

9 Dimensions Team Building Activity

9 Dimensions is a powerful activity designed to build relationships and trust among team members.

There are 2 variations of this icebreaker. The first version is for teams who want to get to know each other better. The second version is for teams who want to explore how they are working together as a team.

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Liberating Structures

What I Need From You (WINFY)

People working in different functions and disciplines can quickly improve how they ask each other for what they need to be successful. You can mend misunderstandings or dissolve prejudices developed over time by demystifying what group members need in order to achieve common goals. Since participants articulate core needs to others and each person involved in the exchange is given the chance to respond, you boost clarity, integrity, and transparency while promoting cohesion and coordination across silos: you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again!

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Hyper Island

Explore your Values

Your Values is an exercise for participants to explore what their most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitive feeling rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values. It is a good exercise to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values.

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Robert from SessionLab

Leadership Pizza

This leadership development activity offers a self-assessment framework for people to first identify what skills, attributes and attitudes they find important for effective leadership, and then assess their own development and initiate goal setting.

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Jonathan Courtney (AJ&Smart Berlin)

Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ)

It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you work with other people together as a team, you will always encounter the same challenges:

  • Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work and overtime
  • Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused and without clear outcomes.
  • Frustration builds up because internal challenges to productivity are not addressed
  • Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and momentum
  • Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision- making, leaving everybody to come up with their own interpretation.
  • In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort, projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.
AJ&Smart has worked with some of the most innovative, productive companies in the world. What sets their teams apart from others is not better tools, bigger talent or more beautiful offices. The secret sauce to becoming a more productive, more creative and happier team is simple:
Replace all open discussion or brainstorming with a structured process that leads to more ideas, clearer decisions and better outcomes.


When a good process provides guardrails and a clear path to follow, it becomes easier to come up with ideas, make decisions and solve problems.


This is why AJ&Smart created Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ). It’s a simple and short, but powerful group exercise that can be run either in-person, in the same room, or remotely with distributed teams.
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Thiagi Group

Looking Around

Here's another jolt that explores one of our favorite themes: You have to unlearn something old in order to learn something new. A nice thing about this brief activity is that you don't need any supplies or equipment.

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Hyper Island

Team Self-Assessment

This is a structured process designed for teams to explore the way they work together. The tight structure supports team members to be open and honest in their assessment. After reflecting as individuals, the team builds a collective map which can serve as the basis for further discussions and actions. The assessment is based around 6 dimensions. Each one encouraging the team to reflect and analyse a different and crucial element of their behaviour.