Library of facilitation techniques

A physical-participation disentanglement puzzle that helps a group learn how to work together (self-organize) and can be used to illustrate the difference between self-organization and command-control management or simply as a get-to-know-you icebreaker. Standing in a circle, group members reach across to connect hands with different people. The group then tries to unravel the “human knot” by unthreading their bodies without letting go of each other people’s hands.

As a management-awareness game to illustrate required change in behavior and leadership on a management level (e.g., illustrate the change from ‘task-oriented’ management towards ‘goal/value-oriented’ management).

Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.

Here's a closer that encourages participants to recall what happened in the session and to come up with second thoughts about how they could have benefited more. It also creates useful materials for an interesting icebreaker.

Co-development is a methodology of collective intelligence. It is a development approach for professionals in which participants learn from each other and consolidate their practice. The brainstorming realized, individually and with the group, is favored by a structured exercise of consultation in relation to the issues experienced by the group members.

This is an agenda for an initial 4-hour FutureSearch workshop

This an easy but powerful exercise to open a meeting or session and get participants to reflect on their attitudes or feelings about a topic, in the organization, team, or in the project.

Workshops & Wizards is a deck of cards intended to support facilitation training and collaborative sessions by encouraging participants to give one another kudos and celebrate positive group dynamics.

Sometimes it can be difficult to keep a meeting on track when people have a hard time staying focused at the right level. People can find themselves “down in the weeds” or operational details when the meeting is supposed to be strategic, or, conversely, they can find themselves being too abstract and strategic when operational detail is exactly what’s needed.

Writing with empathy is all about inhabiting the shoes (or paws) of something that is not yourself. In this exercise, we ask participants to imagine the perspective of a fox and then write from the point of view of the fox.

Want to experience a fun, ever-change game? Bring a round of Calvinball to your next meeting - with a football, deckchairs, rackets, boomerangs, a deck of cards, a hula hoop, pens and paper (anything!) . . . and anyone can change the rules at any time.