This opening activity works well for topics that deal with the challenges of change. It is adapted from an activity developed and used by Crestcom, a management and leadership development company.
You can help a group of people understand how they work together and identify changes that they can make to improve group performance. All members of the group diagnose current relationship patterns and decide how to follow up with action steps together, without intermediaries. The STAR compass tool helps group members understand what makes their relationships more or less generative. The compass used in the initial diagnosis can also be used later to evaluate progress in developing relationships that are more generative.
Any breakout group activity to capture ideas and generate dialogue around them.
This simulation game consists of six rounds of activity, each involving a different participant. A mini debriefing discussion is undertaken immediately after each round to identify the emotional impact of the type of goal statement used during the round and to relate the experience with workplace events. The final activity requires participants to apply their insights to the specification of work-related performance goals.
In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.
The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. Visit the Marshmallow Challenge website for more information. This version has an extra debriefing question added with sample questions focusing on roles within the team.
Get inspired today by a world 20 years away.
Sometimes it helps to start from the end. This exercise will help you align with your team on an audacious vision for your project - one that you can work backward from.
Open Space is a methodology for large groups to create their agenda discerning important topics for discussion, suitable for conferences, community gatherings and whole system facilitation
Help a group to time-travel and tap their imagination by fictional objects.
With tangible objects and the stories your participants make up w/ them you'll get so much richer inputs and context to inform joint visioning / strategizing:
The future doesn't look that far away when you can pick it off the shelf.
This is an exercise to use when the group gets stuck in details and struggles to see the big picture. Also good for defining a vision.