Library of facilitation techniques

DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices.

DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.

Create wild, weird and often funny postcards together & establish a group's creative confidence.

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.

A quick drawing activity to better understand neurodiversity.

An emotional journey is a visualization that maps and illustrates a user’s emotional experience through the experience of interacting with an organization, product or brand.

This activity could work between sessions as an energiser or an icebreaker. It builds on participants' memory and communication.

Polarities live as interdependent pairs that need each other to exist, for example inhaling & exhaling. One pole is not valued as better than the other. Polarities have an enduring quality, they are unavoidable and unsolvable.

Polarities live everywhere from our internal dialogue to external patterns of relating in society and within organizations. Overfocus on any one pole leads to the breakdown of the system as a whole.

Starting a meeting or after a break in a group where participants don't know each other or don't know much about each other

Your Values is an exercise for participants to explore what their most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitive feeling rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values. It is a good exercise to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values.

Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be conducted with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics. This is an exercise for groups or teams that have worked together for some time and are familiar with giving and receiving feedback. It uses the words “stop”, “start” and “continue” to guide the feedback messages.

Evaluate the factors that will either support or hinder a change in an organisation or entity.