Library of facilitation techniques
find the right tool for your next session
Methods (612)
Bowls of Questions
Add bowls full of questions to the coffee break or lunch tables during your event to encourage people to deepen their connections.
Brownian Motion (stop and start as group)
Silent exercise. Three modes of walking at the top of the exercise: neutral walk, fast/hurried walk, slow walk. Then add full stop, then stop & jump, then any mode. Whole group responds when it changes.
Call To Action Follow Up
Used as a post-session follow up or multiple session activity, participants share their action plan or project success. Results can be posted and discussed on a shared network or brought to a later live session (such as a review session or informal group catch up).
Celebrity Party
Great activity to help people warm up in a new environment.
Check-in / Check-out
Either checking-in or checking-out is a simple way for a team to open or close a process, symbolically and in a collaborative way. Checking-in/out invites each member in a group to be present, seen and heard, and to express a reflection or a feeling. Checking-in emphasizes presence, focus and group commitment; checking-out emphasizes reflection and symbolic closure.
Choose your words wisely
Humans live in language. It defines what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Language is the bedrock of our cultures and societies. As with fish in water, we go about our daily business without paying much attention to the language around us and how it influences us. Information architect and author, Jorge Arango developed Semantic Environment Mapping years ago to make visible the everyday language through which we so naively swim.
Circles and Soup
The goal of the game is to efficiently form high-quality plans through retrospective analysis by recognizing factors that are within the team’s control.
Circle, Square, Triangle
At the end of a workshop, it's important to reflect on the things you've learnt, the things you still need to work on and how the things you've learnt in the workshop will help you improve. This activity encourages post-session reflection, and is suitable to be run remotely.
Conflict Responses
A workshop for a team to reflect on past conflicts, and use them to generate guidelines for effective conflict handling. The workshop uses the Thomas-Killman model of conflict responses to frame a reflective discussion. Use it to open up a discussion around conflict with a team.