Library of facilitation techniques

Use the Group Works cards to design/debrief your facilitated session and/or live in the moment to deal with challenges that emerge.

The Feedback Mingle is an exercise in which every member in a group gives feedback to every other member in the group. Often used as a closing activity, it aims to facilitate feedback, generate positive energy and create a sense of team.

Free open-source tool that allows you to simply type or scribe notes & immediately see them appear in a large flipchart image on your webcam within the meeting.

Most facilitators know the power of a flipchart to draw out, capture and recognise participant input. But flipcharts are not so easy to use in the online world.

Virtual Flipcharts plug this gap and provide an easy to use tool that will be very familiar to you and your team. It even looks like a physical flipchart.

During the conversation, you type or scribe (draw) things directly into a page on Powerpoint and they appear instantly on your virtual flipchart in your webcam window. This means that they can play a part in simple 'round-virtual-table' face to face discussion without the disruption of screen sharing.

Create as many pages as you need and move between them with a scroll of your mouse.

Furthermore, the content of the virtual flipchart pages can instantly be distributed via emails to everyone at the meeting, and/or it can be send as sticky-notes to any of the other tools and techniques you might be using (for grouping, sorting, voting, display, off-line work, syndicates etc.)

Use cases: Capture ideas in a brainstorm; Record different perspectives in a discussion; Put ideas into the parking lot; Sketch out an idea or explanation; Create simple tools (like SWOT) within it; ... basically, anything you would use a real flipchart for.

Brief active response during a presentation or (shudder) lecture, can take 2 minutes or 10, can be silent or voiced.

Scrum is like a house, where the team can be safe and self-organize. They will build trust and continuous improvement. Respect Scrum team as an ecosystem will help the team evolve and build up teamwork, and the values will come Day by Day, Sprint by Sprint.

In every Sprint, Sprint Retrospective is an excellent chance to inspect and adapt the way of working. There are many formats to help Scrum Master facilitates the Sprint Retrospective. But I always think about the format that can focus on the team environment, the ecosystem. I keep thinking and uphold that idea, and I found the inspiration from the "Parable of the Soils”. Borrow that parable; I create the Sprint Retrospective format “The 4 Soils”. The meaning of this format is to focus on how to help the Scrum team define what is the good/ bad impact to the house o of Scrum. From that, team will have the action or change to improve/ maintain the ecosystem.

How do we look back, what have we learned?

The Team Canvas is Business Model Canvas for teamwork. It is an effective technique to facilitate getting teams aligned about their goals, values and purposes, and help team members find their role on the team.

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.

To understand and respect each other’s differences in worldview.

Participants set up their virtual workspace and tech configurations based on facilitator recommendations or online guides. Next, they take photos of their workspaces and tech. Finally, they share their set up and live video in the virtual session, which could also be spun into a competition.