Library of facilitation techniques

Have people take out their phone 
Select the 10th photo
Share with your partner/table

The purpose of a retrospective is to reflect on the process of the team’s collaboration, rather than on the content of work itself. This opening icebreaker helps participants to get in a reflective mood and share their thoughts and feelings.

1. All behaviour is connected (no behaviour is isolated).

2. All behaviour is created jointly (and is in fact circular).

3. You cannot not behave.

4. All behaviour provokes feedback.

5. A change in one part of a system results in a change in another part.

This is an essential process designed to help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose). Defining these two things will help any team to be more focused and aligned. With support of tangible examples from other companies, the team members work as individuals and a group to codify the way they work together. The goal is a visual manifestation of both the purpose and culture that can be put up in the team's work space.

This method helps groups assess the potential impacts of future changes, both positive and negative, and reflect on how resilient they are to different types of disruption. It supports balanced, practical conversations that go beyond excitement or fear, focusing instead on preparation and adaptability.

Purpose: People and Teams need to reflect as part of learning and innovation. Reflection can reveal strengths and areas for improvement. During the transition from one year to the next, we tend to focus on what's coming up in the new year.

Planning ahead and creating goals is important, but let's not forget to reflect on the previous year to learn from our experiences and get focused and deliberate about the future choices we make. After the Reflection, there is a gratitude and intention-setting option.

A simple exercise in which each participant prepares a personal presentation of him/herself sharing several important experiences, events, people or stories that contributed to shaping him or her as an individual. The purpose of personal presentations is to support each participant in getting to know each other as individuals and to build trust and openness in a group by enlarging the social arena.

Cover Story is a game about pure imagination. The purpose is to think expansively around an ideal future state for the organization; it’s an exercise in visioning. The object of the game is to suspend all disbelief and envision a future state that is so stellar that it landed your organization on the cover of a well-known magazine

A drawing exercise that shows us how we can have different perspectives on various subjects and/or objects - demonstrating cultural diversities. It can help us unlock some of our unconscious assumptions and biases. The task is fairly simple to execute and doesn’t require more than 6 A4 pages/or post-its and a pen for each participant, or a Miro/Mural or virtual whiteboard.

The premise of this game, therefore, is to disclose and discover unknown information that can impact organizational and group success in any area of the company—management, planning, team performance, and so forth.

De Breaking News oefening laat studenten reflecteren op de aannames en implicaties van een bepaalde theorie.