Library of facilitation techniques

The Product box is a classic from the Agile games line. The kind of typical workshop that turns an austere meeting room into a middle school classroom. In the usual version, this game needs a few accessories: A4 cardboard boxes, scissors, glue, stickers, and the participant’s imagination... This workshop definitely requires some logistical support. It takes about 2 hours to complete and you need one facilitator to manage 6 to 12 participants max.

Teams are asked to imagine that this product will be sold in a department store, just like another everyday product. As they imagine the product, they make decisions about its name, a slogan, a logo and 3 or 4 key selling points on the front of the packaging. And on the back of the packaging: a detailed description, the prerequisites and the conditions of use.

Images have the ability to spark insights and to create new associations and possible connections. That is why pictures help generate new ideas, which is exactly the point of this exercise.

A fun and reliable technique for scoring many ideas, with instant visual results. Participants rate statements by dropping tokens in Feedback Frames in a range of slots that are hidden by a cover, with results later revealed as a visual graph of opinions. This simple in-person analog tool uses secret score voting to recognize nuanced gradients of agreement towards consensus and avoid traditional voting problems such as groupthink and vote-splitting, which are common in sticker dot voting.

This game has been designed to help prioritize different ideas or items in a quick and energetic way without getting stuck in endless discussions and avoiding any kind of influencing. It is similar to 20-20 game as it will compare items in pairs.

Polarities live as interdependent pairs that need each other to exist, for example inhaling & exhaling. One pole is not valued as better than the other. Polarities have an enduring quality, they are unavoidable and unsolvable.

Polarities live everywhere from our internal dialogue to external patterns of relating in society and within organizations. Overfocus on any one pole leads to the breakdown of the system as a whole.

Playful learning with your group: from standard process (establishing best practice) into chaotic situation.

n a reflective teamwork activity (RTA), the process and the content merge with each other. Participants work through an activity and use the outcomes to evaluate the process they used. Here's an RTA that explores challenges associated with losing and gaining team members in the midst of a project.

We’ve all attended a meeting, taken a course, or read an article that moved us no further than to pique our interest. Putting new insights into action is the payoff for attention spent. And we multiply that payoff if we take a moment to reflect on a more broad understanding of the concept or technique we found so interesting.

Objective of play

Here, There, Everywhere emerged so that workshop participants might detail – sometimes in front of the room, sometimes just to themselves – how they will change their behavior once they return to work.

Source

Here, There, Everywhere was created by David Mastronardi and Eric Wittenberg

A concept sketch is a fast freehand drawing.

To be used in Ideation phase.

A drawing exercise that shows us how we can have different perspectives on various subjects and/or objects - demonstrating cultural diversities. It can help us unlock some of our unconscious assumptions and biases. The task is fairly simple to execute and doesn’t require more than 6 A4 pages/or post-its and a pen for each participant, or a Miro/Mural or virtual whiteboard.

Een manier van brainstormen die creativiteit aanmoedigt en zorgt dat men voortborduurt op de ideeën van anderen.

Brainwriting kan gebruikt worden als onderdeel van een uitgebreidere toekomstverkenning. Lees de oefening Scenario-analyse voor een overzicht van alle opdrachten die hier onderdeel van uitmaken.

This brainstorming method uses our senses to generate ideas.