Library of facilitation techniques
find the right tool for your next session
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This game has been designed to gather facts and opinions from the participants on different aspects of the issue at stake. It will help gain and share insight from all points of view, since everyone will have had the chance to contribute.
Hot Surprise Pillow
An ice-breaker activity that is fun for everyone.
More Effective Meetings
This activity helps participants to identify some of the problems that causes ineffective meetings.
Au Contraire
Bring Your Own Dashboard
Most teams, regardless of size, can access data measuring their progress towards goals. Use this group activity to validate the strategic alignment of your KPIs, understand the relationships between them, and brainstorm tests you can perform to validate both.
Pre-Mortem
Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming.
A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful.
End of Year Reflection + Gratitude & Intention Setting
Purpose: People and Teams need to reflect as part of learning and innovation. Reflection can reveal strengths and areas for improvement. During the transition from one year to the next, we tend to focus on what's coming up in the new year.
Planning ahead and creating goals is important, but let's not forget to reflect on the previous year to learn from our experiences and get focused and deliberate about the future choices we make. After the Reflection, there is a gratitude and intention-setting option.
Weather Check-in
Each person describes how they are feeling in terms of a weather system.
Look and Scream
Close eyes, then everyone looks across circle at another player and if they make eye contact they scream dramatically and leave the game.
Virtual Flipcharts (within the webcam)
Free open-source tool that allows you to simply type or scribe notes & immediately see them appear in a large flipchart image on your webcam within the meeting.
Most facilitators know the power of a flipchart to draw out, capture and recognise participant input. But flipcharts are not so easy to use in the online world.
Virtual Flipcharts plug this gap and provide an easy to use tool that will be very familiar to you and your team. It even looks like a physical flipchart.
During the conversation, you type or scribe (draw) things directly into a page on Powerpoint and they appear instantly on your virtual flipchart in your webcam window. This means that they can play a part in simple 'round-virtual-table' face to face discussion without the disruption of screen sharing.
Create as many pages as you need and move between them with a scroll of your mouse.
Furthermore, the content of the virtual flipchart pages can instantly be distributed via emails to everyone at the meeting, and/or it can be send as sticky-notes to any of the other tools and techniques you might be using (for grouping, sorting, voting, display, off-line work, syndicates etc.)
- Use cases: Capture ideas in a brainstorm; Record different perspectives in a discussion; Put ideas into the parking lot; Sketch out an idea or explanation; Create simple tools (like SWOT) within it; ... basically, anything you would use a real flipchart for.