Library of facilitation techniques

Film producer and innovator Walt Disney used to think-up and refine ideas by breaking the process into three distinct chunks.

This activity begins with reflection, proceeds through nonverbal communication, and ends in a discussion. You can use ARTFUL CLOSER to debrief participants after an experiential activity. You may also use it as the final activity at the end of a workshop. You may even use it as an opening ice-breaker by asking participants to think about common personal experiences. For example, I began a recent session on presentation skills by asking participants to process their experiences with the most inspiring speech they had ever heard.

Great questions broaden your horizon, change your perspective, and have the ability to connect people around a topic, without judgment. 

How do we look back, what is still unclear?

cultureQs is a Change and Integration accelerator activity that uses powerful Questions to inspire participants to reflect on the foundations of their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.

Attività per attivare altri punti di vista, altre prospettive

A Focused Conversation to begin to process traumatic situations for use with colleagues, friends and family, and how to respond to them productively. Often traumatic events become undiscussable and this enables persons to talk about them

Dotmocracy is a simple method for group prioritization or decision-making. It is not an activity on its own, but a method to use in processes where prioritization or decision-making is the aim. The method supports a group to quickly see which options are most popular or relevant. The options or ideas are written on post-its and stuck up on a wall for the whole group to see. Each person votes for the options they think are the strongest, and that information is used to inform a decision.

Plan several stations in your area. Each station will present a ethical dilemma. Participants are traveling in groups and falling to smaller groups as they are choosing different answers. In the end, they all arrive to the final. The reflection is focused on their decision-making process.

The use of lectures for training adults has several advantages and several disadvantages. So does the use of training games. What if we combine these two approaches in a complementary fashion? That is the idea behind interactive lectures.

Interactive lectures involve participants in the learning process while providing complete control to the instructor. These activities enable a quick and easy conversion of a passive presentation into an interactive experience. Different types of interactive lectures incorporate built-in quizzes, interspersed tasks, teamwork interludes, and participant control of the presentation.

One effective approach to adding interactivity to lectures involves requiring participants to review what they heard and summarize the key points. This approach reinforces learning and improves recall.

Missing Sentence provides an intriguing twist to an interactive lecture that is based on the review-and-summary strategy.

Most prioritization and polling processes require participants to either be in the same room (e.g. dot voting) or on the same whiteboard if online. Here is your cheat sheet on how to adapt those to hybrid environments! Tech tasks

Collect all available options on a virtual whiteboard

Number the options

Create a poll on a tool that is easy to use from phones (e.g. Mentimeter) and share the link