Humans live in language. It defines what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Language is the bedrock of our cultures and societies. As with fish in water, we go about our daily business without paying much attention to the language around us and how it influences us. Information architect and author, Jorge Arango developed Semantic Environment Mapping years ago to make visible the everyday language through which we so naively swim.
Arguments, presentations, strategies, or other plans are sent to other teams for deconstruction in order to find gaps or problems.
Use Craig Raine's poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.
Even with established teams, it’s important to get people into the holiday mood and encourage creativity and collaboration.
Assign people into pairs or triads and each pair/triad needs to write one pair of rhyme for the music of a popular song. In this holiday-themed version, we'll ask participants to create a version of Jingle bells.
Whatever the occasion or song, it's a nice twist if they incorporate something in the lyrics that is related to your own company and culture.
The Circle of Trust is a tool that can be used both individually and for groups. You can rate your circle of trust - think of your ‘inner circle’; work, school, or another group - to see how diverse the group of people you trust is.
This Pizza Game is a great way for new or established teams to understand the principles of Lean & Agile by diving into Kanban in a quick and fun way that is hard to communicate through words alone. It teaches you how to get from an existing process to a Kanban system, how to visualize the system, and start modifying it.
The Pizza Game enables the teams to have a hands-on experience feeling the pains, gains, frustrations, and fun throughout the process - and to reflect on improvements that the participants can share back in their workplace. Bonus: you get to make (paper or digital) Pizza!
Invite participants to identify and reflect on which parts of their identities they bring into regular interactions.
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".
An exercise designed to investigate value based conflict, decision making, highlights the challenges of establishing right and wrong with different perspectives.
Sometimes it can be difficult to keep a meeting on track when people have a hard time staying focused at the right level. People can find themselves “down in the weeds” or operational details when the meeting is supposed to be strategic, or, conversely, they can find themselves being too abstract and strategic when operational detail is exactly what’s needed.
Since you participants are not allowed to talk during the activity they need to get used to another "language" that could help them understand each other.
Writing with empathy is all about inhabiting the shoes (or paws) of something that is not yourself. In this exercise, we ask participants to imagine the perspective of a fox and then write from the point of view of the fox.