Library of facilitation techniques

Every meeting deserves a plan. Note that a great plan can’t guarantee a great outcome, but it will help lay down the fundamentals from which you can adapt. Sketch out these fundamentals by using the 7Ps framework.

This is a simple drama game in which participants take turns asking each other “What are you doing?” and acting out the various responses. Though simple, it engages the imagination and gently challenges participants out of their comfort zone by having them mime a range of different actions.

Part of the reason we end up with under-developed ideas is that we stick with the first good idea we have — rather than taking the time to explore complementary approaches. 6-8-5 is designed to combat this pattern by forcing us to generate lots of ideas in a short period of time. The activity can then be repeated to hone & flesh out a few of the best ideas.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool to sort tasks by priorities in one of 4 quadrants:

Important and urgent: these need to be done first
Urgent, but not important: delegate these, if you can
Important, but not urgent: block time to work on these tasks later on
neither important nor urgent: do not do them at all (if possible)

Definitions:
urgent = needs to be done now or very soon
important = will help you reach a goal or has impact on your life, your customers, your company

A subset of people with direct field experience can quickly foster understanding, spark creativity, and facilitate adoption of new practices among members of a larger community. Fishbowl sessions have a small inside circle of people surrounded by a larger outside circle of participants. The inside group is formed with people who made concrete progress on a challenge of interest to those in the outside circle. The fishbowl design makes it easy for people in the inside circle to illuminate what they have done by sharing experiences while in conversation with each other. The informality breaks down the barriers with direct communication between the two groups of people and facilitates questions and answers flowing back and forth. This creates the best conditions for people to learn from each other by discovering answers to their concerns themselves within the context of their working groups. You can stop imposing someone else’s practices!

With a series of prompts a surprising and amazing future is created.

This is a feedback exercise to support participants to deliver feedback that is clear and specific, especially after working in multiple project teams over a longer period of time. The team maps the connections between individuals, then uses specific points of interaction to prompt feedback.

You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking.

This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!

This tool guides your team through the process of writing a remote working charter, defining the guidelines and behaviour expected of people working at a distance. Team members reflect on their own remote working experiences and use that insight to create a shared charter for the group / organisation.

A questioning method for generating, explaining, investigating ideas.