Library of facilitation techniques

Leadership and Personal Development Group Activities

Activities to support personal development and train new soft skills. Help your participants to reflect, grow self-awareness and learn new interpersonal skills.
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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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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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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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Thiagi Group

Lasting Impression Elevator Pitch

How do you explain what you do to someone you meet for the first time and make a lasting impression? Being able to explain what you do may result in a career spurt—or at least help you avoid some embarrassment. Participants write a short pitch they can use to introduce themselves to clients or new acquaintances or to make unscheduled presentations. Later, they have the pitch critiqued and improved using a three-part rating system.
Thiagi Group

Quick-Change Artists

In these days of constant change, adaptability and resilience are highly desirable personal qualities. This activity enables the participants to tap into their group wisdom and work on their ability to flourish under frequent changes. Participants work individually, with a partner, and in teams to prepare a list of do's and don't-s for increasing their ability to adapt to changes. Eventually, each participant selects a factor that he or she wants to apply immediately.
Liberating Structures

Drawing Together

You can help people access hidden knowledge such as feelings, attitudes, and patterns that are difficult to express with words. When people are tired, their brains are full, and they have reached the limits of logical thinking, you can help them evoke ideas that lie outside logical, step-by-step understanding of what is possible. Stories about individual or group transformations can be told with five easy-to-draw symbols that have universal meanings. The playful spirit of drawing together signals that more is possible and many new answers are expected. Drawing Together cuts through the culture of overreliance on what people say and write that constrains the emergence of novelty. It also provides a new avenue of expression for some people whose ideas would otherwise not surface.

Thiagi Group

Thirty-five for Debriefing

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.

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Shirley  Gaston

Tower of Power

This teamwork activity requires participants to work closely together to build a tower from a set of building blocks. 

The players need to coordinate their actions in order to be able to move the wooden blocks with the crane they have, and this can only be solved by precise planning, good communication and well-organised teamwork.

You may use this exercise to emphasise the following themes and outcomes:

  • In Leadership training: identifying interdependencies in systems, leadership communication, dealing with risk, giving feedback
  • In Team building: communicating effectively, cooperating, being an active listener, maintaining the balance, working with values
  • In Project management: simulating strategic planning, working under time pressure
  • In Communication training: meta communication, facilitating, dealing with different perspectives
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Hyper Island

Back-turned Feedback

Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be led with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics.

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