Bottle Tower
Teams of 4-5 members are competing to build the highest free-standing tower using empty water bottles and rope - a different version of the Marshmallow challenge.
Library of facilitation techniques
The Thiagi Group
Workshop Activities and Training Games from The Thiagi Group.
110 results
Methods (110)
Words and Pictures
This is a modification of an interactive lecture activity that is transformed into a textra game. This activity can be inserted after participants finish reading a handout. It involves a poster preparation contest that taps into the listeners' linguistic and visual intelligences.
More Effective Meetings
This activity helps participants to identify some of the problems that causes ineffective meetings.
Best Summary
Asking listeners to summarize your presentation from time to time is a good technique for encouraging people to listen carefully, take notes, and to review the content. Best Summaries uses this basic concept.
Blame or Praise
This exercise is based on Joshua Knobe's experiments on intentional activity and side effects. It explores how a person's intentions affect our decision to assign blame or praise to a behaviour.
Participants work with two different versions of the same situation. One version focuses on a harmful side effect of a decision, while the other deals with a helpful side effect. The debriefing discussion explores how we are more willing to blame for harmful side effects than praise for helpful side effects.
Au Contraire
Very often when people learn something new, they assume that they knew it all along. This way of thinking is called the hindsight bias.
Participants receive one of two proverbs that contradict each other. Later, they are asked to come up with examples and explanations to prove that the proverb that they received presents an obvious truth.
Quick Scan
Here's an opening for a workshop on negotiation. You may recognize this activity as a modification of our popular Hello activity.
Timescapes in Threes
This is a great activity to show the power of "now" which we usually underestimate.
Who and Why?
You already know a lot about factors that increase and decrease people's trustworthiness. This is because ever since you were a baby, you have learned through experience who to trust and who to distrust. This activity asks you to think about six people and decide why you trust or distrust them.
Draw a Hand
Here's a jolt that can be conducted within 99 seconds, raising awarness of our automatic stereotyping processes.
Trustworthy
You may be a trustworthy computer programmer but nobody may trust your ability to manage a project. You may trust your surgeon to do brain surgery—but not to give you financial advice.
Trustworthy differentiates behaviors and traits that contribute to trustworthiness in different situations (such as predictability) and other behaviors and traits that are limited to specific situations (such as surgical expertise).
Big changes
In a brain-pick activity, participants interview people who share a common experience or background. (These people are called informants.) Participants interact with these informants—and with each other—to collect and organize useful information.
This activity uses people who have undergone major organizational changes. Participants interview them to come up with a list of guidelines for coping with change.