Library of facilitation techniques

In Appreciative Interviews, participants tell each other stories about how they successfully faced a challenge and identify what made them successful. In less than an hour, a group can identify the conditions essential for its success. This structure generates momentum and insights for positive change, and shows that social support is key to success.

You can overcome the tendency of organizations to underinvest in social supports that generate success while overemphasizing financial support, time, and technical assistance.

It brings to life LS Principle #5, Practice Self-Discovery Within a Group.

In Wicked Questions, participants ask, “How is it that we are doing two things in tension with each other simultaneously?” These questions reveal entangled challenges that are unintuitive or difficult to discuss. Wicked Questions can reduce either-or thinking and engage everyone in thinking strategically about how to balance competing priorities. It can be particularly useful in transitions because it exposes the tension between what is being said and what is actually being done. This structure reinforces LS Principle #7, Emphasize Possibilities: Believe Before You See.

Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we often force information to fit our existing beliefs.

W3 helps groups break this pattern by reflecting on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict.

Progressing in stages makes this practical: collecting facts (What Happened), making sense of them (So What), and identifying what actions logically follow (Now What). Every voice is heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction.

The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do — enlivening LS Principle #4, Learn by Failing Forward. Voila!

In Network Relationship Patterns, participants identify how their group describes its work, how it actually works, and how it wants to work.

This structure clarifies current relationship patterns to map a transition toward new ones. It is designed to make conversations about intangible group dynamics easier by providing a shared language for describing and visualizing patterns.

Participants use simple cards to represent different roles, behaviors, or connection types in a network (for example, who initiates, who bridges, who withdraws, who amplifies).

By arranging and rearranging these cards, groups can explore how influence flows, where bottlenecks exist, and how new connection patterns might improve collaboration. This structure helps teams better understand relational dynamics and intentionally shift toward more productive and inclusive network patterns.

It brings to life LS Principle #7, Emphasize Possibilities: Believe Before You See.

What made success possible? In less than one hour, a group of any size can generate the list of conditions that are essential for its success. You can liberate spontaneous momentum and insights for positive change from within the organization as “hidden” success stories are revealed. Positive movement is sparked by the search for what works now and by uncovering the root causes that make success possible.

You can eliminate or mitigate common bottlenecks that stifle performance by sifting your group’s portfolio of activities, identifying which elements are starving for resources and which ones are rigid and hampering progress. The Ecocycle makes it possible to sift, prioritize, and plan actions with everyone involved in the activities at the same time, as opposed to the conventional way of doing it behind closed doors with a small group of people. Additionally, the Ecocycle helps everyone see the forest AND the trees—they see where their activities fit in the larger context with others.

Ecocycle Planning invites leaders to focus also on creative destruction and renewal in addition to typical themes regarding growth or efficiency. The Ecocycle makes it possible to spur agility, resilience, and sustained performance by including all four phases of development in the planning process.

LS Principle #8, Invite Creative Destruction to Enable Innovation.

Notice threads in the present that if tugged on might unravel a more attractive future. Identify how the hints of a more ideal future are present, just not widely distributed yet. Participants can notice small changes, support structures, and local success patterns that have the potential to be scaled up to a global transformation. This includes surfacing strategies to overcome resistance and methods to spread early successes. Future~Present does not produce a plan to be implemented but rather builds momentum, imagination, social proof, and confidence in subtle or incremental signals. This builds capacity to actively shape next steps and pounce on opportunities. Future~Present enacts LS Principle #9, Engage in Seriously Playful Curiosity.

This method quickly provokes a deeper set of reflections and insights among group members. While standing in two concentric circles, everyone forms a pair with someone else and completes an open-ended sentence in less than thirty seconds. After one minute, the participants move to the right, form a new pair, and complete the next sentence. This allows the entire group to simultaneously have a conversation, share ideas & insights, and quickly get to know many new persons.

This is a structured discussion activity for exploring a topic by answering questions in three different set-ups: individually, in pairs and in teams. 

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.