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.
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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

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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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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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.

Hyper Island

Active Listening

This activity supports participants to reflect on a question and generate their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with it. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being: “the subject”, the listener, and the observer.

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Hyper Island

Action Plan Workshop: The Arrow

This workshop aims to help participants define, decide and achieve their goals. By supporting participants to envision where they want to be in a number of years on a holistic level, and defining the steps that will take them there, participants get a clearer picture of the action they need to take.

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Moritz  Gekeler

Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament)

This is a fun and loud energiser based on the well-known “Rock, Paper, Scissor” game - with a twist: the losing players become the fan of the winners as the winner advances to the next round. This goes on until a final showdown with two large cheering crowds!

It can be played with adults of all levels as well as kids and it always works! 

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Thiagi Group

Seven Words

Ever heard the cliché, “It's not what you say, but how you say it”? The Seven Words jolt dramatically demonstrates this principle. You demonstrate how the meaning of a sentence changes as you emphasize different words. Later, you invite pairs of participants to explore this concept.

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