Library of facilitation techniques

Strategy Workshop Activities

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Gamestorming methods

Even Flow

Polarities live as interdependent pairs that need each other to exist, for example inhaling & exhaling. One pole is not valued as better than the other. Polarities have an enduring quality, they are unavoidable and unsolvable.

Polarities live everywhere from our internal dialogue to external patterns of relating in society and within organizations. Overfocus on any one pole leads to the breakdown of the system as a whole.

Gamestorming methods

Manage What You Measure

Measures of success vary across an organization. Executives concern themselves with company-wide Objectives involving Revenue, Cost, Profit, Margin and Customer Satisfaction.

Further down the org chart, management and individual contributors rate performance against more detailed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tracking customer behavior: a product manager may measure app downloads, or number of shopping cart items per visit. These customer behaviors clearly affect the larger corporate Objectives, but how? and which have the most impact?

Gamestorming methods

Make A World

The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It’s useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it. All successful ventures start with a vision and some small, initial effort toward crystallization. Alexander Graham Bell’s vision for the telephone started as highly rudimentary sketches.

Liberating Structures

Mad Tea

Mad Tea quickly provokes a deeper set of reflections and strategic insights among group members. The questions focus attention and produce a fresh understanding of strategic options and next steps. Participants form two circles, one inside the other.

Each person faces one other person and completes an open-ended sentence in less than 30 seconds. When time is up, participants are invited to move to their right so that they are in front of someone else to complete the next sentence, and so on. In a seriously fun way, the unfinished sentences focus attention on every individual and the group answering tough questions together (e.g., If we do nothing, the worst thing that can happen for us is…).