I dread the moment when people ask me, “What do you do?” I don't know how to explain that I am a performance technologist, or an instructional designer, or a facilitator. So I cheat by saying that I am a trainer.
Here's an activity that helps you become more fluent in explaining what you do for a living.
Mash-ups is a collaborative idea generation method in which participants come up with innovative concepts by combining different elements together. In a first step, participants brainstorm around different areas, such as technologies, human needs, and existing services. In a second step, they rapidly combine elements from those areas to create new, fun and innovative concepts. Mash-ups demonstrates how fast and easy it can be to come up with innovative ideas.
You can help a large crowd generate and sort their bold ideas for action in 30 minutes or less! With 25/10 Crowd Sourcing, you can spread innovations “out and up” as everyone notices the patterns in what emerges. Though it is fun, fast, and casual, it is a serious and valid way to generate an uncensored set of bold ideas and then to tap the wisdom of the whole group to identify the top ten. Surprises are frequent! This structure brings to life LS Principle #1, Include and Unleash Everyone.
The sequential building of ideas without evaluation.
A timed estimation game that reveals why accurate estimation is so hard, and why asking the right questions matters.
Players are asked to estimate how many iterations they need to connect a given number of dots.
The task looks trivially simple, but there is hidden complexity: Time pressure, total number of dots, lines obscuring numbers. This makes it harder than anyone expects. The gap between "this is ieasy" and "it was actually hard" is the lesson.
Use it when stakeholders wonder why forecasts keep missing, or when you want to shift the conversation from "why can't you estimate better?" to "how can we change the way we work to make more accurate forecasts?"
🌐 Online A ready-to-run digital version of this game is available at https://facilitatorkit.co/connect-the-dots-online. The facilitator creates a session and shares a link — participants join in their browser and play on their own device. The game generates burndown charts automatically after each round.
If I give you a dollar and you give me a dollar, we both end up where we began. But if I give you an idea and you give me an idea, we end up with two ideas each, benefiting from a 100 percent return on our investment.
In One Will Get You Ten, we leverage this principle so that you and all other participants receive a 1000 percent return on your investment on ideas.
A fast get-to-know game that can be tailored according to the participants age/profession/etc.
Fun imaginative energizer requiring minimal materials! Come up with what else a pencil could be (e.g., a straw, a shovel, a wand)
Sync Squad is a cooperative puzzle that only rewards a group that talks. Each player drives one colour-coded robot through a shared chamber, and the exit opens only when every robot stands on its matching goal at the same moment. The catch: each hazard is keyed to a colour, and the thing that's lethal to your teammate is completely harmless to you — so you can never just play your own robot.
