Journalists
This is an exercise to use when the group gets stuck in details and struggles to see the big picture. Also good for defining a vision.
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Angry Customers
Training Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to handle angry and abusive customers is a tough challenge. Effective communication with an angry customer requires a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. As a part of our training session, we use this rapid roleplay activity.
Managing behaviours
Increase your communication skills. Role play to help you recognize and manage different behaviours in a virtual environment (or not!)
Unique Thing in Common
With a partner, find the 3 most unlikely / unusual / unique things you have in common with each other. Each pair chooses one to share with the group.
Issue Analysis
A process for understanding a complex problem situation
Better Connections
We build a stronger relationship with people when we see them as human beings with whom we share similarities in terms of family and life situations. It is very difficult to form strong relationships with people about whom we know very little.
We feel more connected to “full” people. For example, take John, the accountant. If I think of John as an accountant, I might put him into a box of what I think I know about accountants. I might not feel connected to accountants and will treat him accordingly. But when I think of John as a keen mountain climber and outdoor adventurer with two children, one of whom is graduating from university next month, then John becomes human to me, and I can feel connected to him.
One Word Method
Creating a sentence relating to a specific topic or problem with each person contributing one word at a time.
Improv Prototyping
You can engage a group to learn and improve rapidly from tapping three levels of knowledge simultaneously: (1) explicit knowledge shared by participants; (2) tacit knowledge discovered through observing each other’s performance; and (3) latent knowledge, i.e., new ideas that emerge and are jointly developed.
This powerful combination can be the source of transformative experiences and, at the same time, it is seriously fun. Participants identify and act out solutions to chronic or daunting problems. A diverse mix of people is invited to dramatize simple elements that work to solve a problem. Innovations represented in the Improv sketches are assembled incrementally from pieces or chunks that can be used separately or together. It is a playful way to get very serious work done!
Birds of a Feather
Participants naturally want to form groups with common characteristics. This exercise illustrates how diverse groups have access to more resources and provide a greater variety of solutions.
Each person is given an index card with a letter on it, and then asked to form a group of five people. Participants assume that they should get into groups with others who have the same letter. However, when the facilitator asks them to form the longest word possible with the letter cards, they realize that it would have been more beneficial to have created a diverse group.
Agreement-Certainty Matrix
You can help individuals or groups avoid the frequent mistake of trying to solve a problem with methods that are not adapted to the nature of their challenge. The combination of two questions makes it possible to easily sort challenges into four categories: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.
- A problem is simple when it can be solved reliably with practices that are easy to duplicate.
- It is complicated when experts are required to devise a sophisticated solution that will yield the desired results predictably.
- A problem is complex when there are several valid ways to proceed but outcomes are not predictable in detail.
- Chaotic is when the context is too turbulent to identify a path forward.
A loose analogy may be used to describe these differences: simple is like following a recipe, complicated like sending a rocket to the moon, complex like raising a child, and chaotic is like the game “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”
The Liberating Structures Matching Matrix in Chapter 5 can be used as the first step to clarify the nature of a challenge and avoid the mismatches between problems and solutions that are frequently at the root of chronic, recurring problems.
Finger Rules
This effective technique can be used at any meeting to make discussions more structured and efficient. By using simple hand gestures, participants can express different opinions and desires.
Wicked Questions
You can spark innovative action while diminishing “yes, but…” and “either-or” thinking.
Wicked Questions engage everyone in sharper strategic thinking by revealing entangled challenges and possibilities that are not intuitively obvious. They bring to light paradoxical-yet-complementary forces that are constantly influencing behaviors and that are particularly important during change efforts.
Wicked Questions make it possible to expose safely the tension between espoused strategies and on-the-ground circumstances and to discover the valuable strategies that lie deeply hidden in paradoxical waters.