Leadership and Personal Development Group Activities

Facilitation Market is a training game where participants will choose a set of facilitation skills, create a magical facilitator who embodies those skills and then share best practices with the rest of the group.

Wizard Mingle is a simple networking activity designed to break the ice while getting participants to discuss core facilitation skills and begin exploring group dynamics.

Workshops & Wizards is a deck of cards intended to support facilitation training and collaborative sessions by encouraging participants to give one another kudos and celebrate positive group dynamics.

Organize the day's meeting by co-creating and assigning roles among participants.

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.

In large gatherings that will be stable for a few days or more, you can combine the benefits of having a high number of attendees (e.g. more minds at work!) with the supportive feel of a small group by creating "home groups" or "buddy groups".

The Fishbowl game is an effective way to activate attention—to prime our natural listening and observing skills so that a more substantive conversation can take place.

Understanding and analyzing a piece of advice are important activities. Here is a game that requires the participants to analyze the features associated with different pieces of advice.

You might be familiar with Thirty-Five as a structured-sharing activity. Thirty-Five can also be used as an effective debriefing game.

In this version, participants reflect on an earlier experience and identify important lessons they learned. They write one of these lessons as a brief item. The winner in this activity is not the best player, but the best lesson learned.

An engaging variation on a feedback activity that focuses on future changes and positive action, rather than dwelling on what went wrong.

You can quickly and effectively share several innovations or useful programs that may lie hidden within a group, organization, or community. Shift & Share gets rid of long large-group presentations and replaces them with several concise descriptions made simultaneously to multiple small groups. A few individuals set up “stations” where they share in ten minutes the essence of their innovations that may be of value to others. As small groups move from one innovator’s station to another, their size makes it easy for people to connect with the innovator. They can quickly learn where and how new ideas are being used and how they might be adapted to their own situations. Innovators learn from the repetition, and groups can easily spot opportunities for creative mash-ups of ideas.

The art of questioning to better listen. 2 rounds for the same team to discover the secret profession of the facilitator (or one of the participants).