Best Summary
Asking listeners to summarize your presentation from time to time is a good technique for encouraging people to listen carefully, take notes, and to review the content. Best Summaries uses this basic concept.
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Group Order
This is an energizing activity that helps members of a group get to know each other, network, and recognize what they have in common.
Letter from the Future
Teams that fail to develop a shared vision of what they are all about and what they need to do suffer later on when team members start implementing the common mandate based on individual assumptions. To help teams get started on the right foot, here is a process for creating a shared vision.
Draw a Hand
Here's a jolt that can be conducted within 99 seconds, raising awarness of our automatic stereotyping processes.
Back to Back
This is an energetic improv game that can be used anytime during a training session. My favourite time to use it is at the end of a session for debriefing.
Participants pair up and stand back-to-back. The facilitator asks a question. The participants turn around and face each other and take turns sharing their responses.
Job Description in 99 Words
Ask the participants to write what their job means to them in exactly 99 words (no more, no less), and then divide participants to explore and discuss the perception of their jobs.
The Creativity Dice
Too much linear thinking is hazardous to creative problem solving. To be creative, you should approach the problem (or the opportunity) from different points of view. You should leave a thought hanging in mid-air and move to another. This skipping around prevents premature closure and lets your brain incubate one line of thought while you consciously pursue another.
Workers and Watchers
Blindfold half of the participants and ask them to lay a rope on the floor in the form of a circle. Conduct a quick debriefing involving the blindfolded workers and the watchers. Blindfold the other half and give them the task of laying the rope on the floor in the form of a triangle. Continue with the debriefing discussion.
Why?
Here's an interesting game that produces humorous results. Hidden behind the humor, however, is subtle provocation that forces participants to think deeply to justify some of the basic principles and assumptions related to the training topic.
Participants write “Why?” questions related to the training topic. Then each participant writes a response to someone else's “Why?” questions. The questions and answers get mixed up, producing incongruous results.
Teammates
Participants work individually, thinking about three teams and the behaviors of desirable teammates and undesirable teammates. Later, they work with a partner (and still later, in teams) to prepare a list of dos and don'ts for being a desirable teammate.
One, Two and More
One, Two, And More is a flexible structured sharing activity for exploring different topics using different sets of questions. A unique feature of this activity is answering each question in three different modes: individual, pairs, and in teams.
Quick Change
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.