Library of facilitation techniques

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IAF is a worldwide community of facilitators promoting excellence in the use of professional group process facilitation to create engagement and impact.

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1,621 results

Methods (1507)

Digital Society School

Empathy in action

Empathy in action is a way to help people empathize with, and understand a specific situation that is foreign to them.

To be used when you have collected enough data to understand a problem and need to let people unfamiliar with the problem empathize with it.

James Smart

Non-verbal improv

An improv game where participants must use non-verbal communication and actions to communicate a phrase or an idea to other players. A fun game that's a great way to open a discussion on better communication!

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Andrea Beliczki

SwitchHats

Build on your ideas by looking at them from someone else's perspective. What would your favorite actor think of your concept? Would your president or prime minister endorse it? What if you were to switch hats with another organization? How would they change or build on your idea?

Hyper Island

MethodKit for Team Development

In the age of digital, we still use analogue tools for meetings and workshops, with blank canvases like whiteboards, flip charts and notebooks as the rule. Why start from zero every time? Instead, MethodKit has collected the most important bits and pieces to get you started, and to further develop your ideas. A framework that allows creativity. What you create is up to you. MethodKit for Team Development is an analogue tool designed to help you structure and organise your teamwork for greater effectiveness, creativity and results. Built around a versatile set of cards, the kit can be used in a range of ways, from project kick-off workshops, to team reflections, coaching sessions and more.

Liberating Structures

Celebrity Interview

You can enable a large group of people to connect with a leader or an expert (the celebrity) as a person and grasp the nuances of how that person is approaching a challenge. With a well-designed interview, you can turn what would otherwise be a passive, often boring presentation into a personal narrative that is entertaining, imparts valuable knowledge, and reveals the full range of rational, emotional, and ethical/moral dynamics at play. You can often turn the interview into an invitation to action, drawing out all the elements needed to spark the participant group’s imagination and encourage cohesive action.

Gamestorming methods

Spectrum Mapping

Spectrum mapping is designed to reveal the diversity of perspectives and options around any given topic and to organize them into a meaningful spectrum. It’s valuable because it unearths information that plays a role in attitudes and behaviours that otherwise may not be visible.

Liberating Structures

Panarchy

You can help a large group of people identify obstacles and opportunities for spreading ideas or innovations at many levels. Panarchy enables people to visualize how systems are embedded in systems and helps them understand how these interdependencies influence the spread of change. Participants become more alert to small changes that can help spread ideas up to other system levels; they learn how shifts at larger or lower system levels may release resources to assist them at another level. With better appreciation of the Ecocycle dynamics at play, the group creates “opportunity windows” for innovations to spread among levels and across boundaries.