Look and Scream
Close eyes, then everyone looks across circle at another player and if they make eye contact they scream dramatically and leave the game.
Library of facilitation techniques
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Methods (1493)
Song Battle
Most people have a repertoire of song lyrics in their head. This activity offers the fun of recalling them, the opportunity to belt them out without anxiety about singing "well", and the aspect of learning which songs "everyone" in the group knows and which are familiar to only you.
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.
Brainstorm questions instead of solutions
When we are given a problem our reflex is to find answers. But it can be difficult to leave the comfort zone and to come up with creative answers. This exercise will encourage to think out of the box.
Blame or Praise
This exercise is based on Joshua Knobe's experiments on intentional activity and side effects. It explores how a person's intentions affect our decision to assign blame or praise to a behaviour.
Participants work with two different versions of the same situation. One version focuses on a harmful side effect of a decision, while the other deals with a helpful side effect. The debriefing discussion explores how we are more willing to blame for harmful side effects than praise for helpful side effects.
Hot Surprise Pillow
An ice-breaker activity that is fun for everyone.
Quick Scan
Here's an opening for a workshop on negotiation. You may recognize this activity as a modification of our popular Hello activity.
Au Contraire
Very often when people learn something new, they assume that they knew it all along. This way of thinking is called the hindsight bias.
Participants receive one of two proverbs that contradict each other. Later, they are asked to come up with examples and explanations to prove that the proverb that they received presents an obvious truth.
Pre-Mortem
Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming.
A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful.
The Circle of Trust
The Circle of Trust is a tool that can be used both individually and for groups. You can rate your circle of trust - think of your ‘inner circle’; work, school, or another group - to see how diverse the group of people you trust is.
Kanban Pizza Game
This Pizza Game is a great way for new or established teams to understand the principles of Lean & Agile by diving into Kanban in a quick and fun way that is hard to communicate through words alone. It teaches you how to get from an existing process to a Kanban system, how to visualize the system, and start modifying it.
The Pizza Game enables the teams to have a hands-on experience feeling the pains, gains, frustrations, and fun throughout the process - and to reflect on improvements that the participants can share back in their workplace. Bonus: you get to make (paper or digital) Pizza!