Library of facilitation techniques

A simple exercise that complements exploratory, discursive, and creative workshops with insights and opinions from outside. Use this exercise when brainstorming ideas, developing a new product or service or creating a strategy or plan that will include others. Participants phone a co-worker and ask them questions relevant to the task. This quickly generates meaningful input from a range of “outside” perspectives. Often, participants will be surprised at how simple it was to solicit this input and how valuable it is to the process.

Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be led with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics.

A fast and loud method to enhance brainstorming within a team. Since this activity has more than round ideas that are repetitive can be ruled out leaving more creative and innovative answers to the challenge.

This game helps participants to get information on each other in a fun, competitive way.

The Starfish can be used wherever you want to get an overview over how people perceive the status quo. It can be used as a gather data exercise in retrospectives or as feedback tool after events.

Participants at a training session are often preoccupied with other important things in their life. Here's a simple jolt to wake them up.

The 4Cs game is a quick way to gather and organize information about any subject using four common key concepts.

The lotus blossom method is a creativity exercise. It is a framework for idea generation, starting from one central theme. Eight conceptual themes grow out from the main theme and each of them are used as central theme to generate 8 more themes. Explore!

Paper Telephone is a mix of two methods, "Telephone" and "Pictionary". It is a creative game aiming to fasten the get-to-know each other phase of the team while having a good time.

This tool helps small and large groups to identify key transformative trends over the next few years, explore their consequences, and begin to look at how they can be met to create business opportunities. By the end of the workshop, participants create a list of most relevant trends; and an elaboration on three most-important trends, including ideas around how their organization/s could act to meet those trends. Can be run both online and face-to-face.

In the Desert Island Game, begin by asking your participants an important question – if you were stranded on a desert island, what essential items would you choose to survive?

Participants are given a list of items to choose from and must work together to decide which items will help them stay alive.

The Desert Island Game is a great, remote-friendly exercise for a team to work together and share opinions.

The sequential building of ideas without evaluation.