Library of facilitation techniques

Creativity through pictures and images

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.

Each person describes how they are feeling in terms of a weather system.    

Participants tell a story of a shared (fictional) memory, adding details one at a time to create a cohesive picture and narrative. 

Try to high-five the person to your right or left. If you match you stay in the game.

Equilateral Triangles Collaboration is an excellent conference icebreaker that highlights how large self-organizing groups can successfully collaborate without the need for stringent rules, regulations and leadership.

As an icebreaker in a workshop or conference that has ‘collaboration’ or 'self-organization' as a key theme.

Use this model to support the group in making own decisions. Great if you want to stop complains and start implementation.

Close eyes, then everyone looks across circle at another player and if they make eye contact they scream dramatically and leave the game.

Build personas of ideas, products or experiences.

Imagine your product is a person. What's its name? What would its ideal date night be? Does it prefer the beach or the woods? This exercise is a playful way to nail down the essence of your idea, product, or service. Use it in ideation or as a way to hone an existing concept.

This meeting icebreaker is a great energizer to do right before a break or coming back from a break, especially if you have stragglers

Free open-source tool that allows you to simply type or scribe notes & immediately see them appear in a large flipchart image on your webcam within the meeting.

Most facilitators know the power of a flipchart to draw out, capture and recognise participant input. But flipcharts are not so easy to use in the online world.

Virtual Flipcharts plug this gap and provide an easy to use tool that will be very familiar to you and your team. It even looks like a physical flipchart.

During the conversation, you type or scribe (draw) things directly into a page on Powerpoint and they appear instantly on your virtual flipchart in your webcam window. This means that they can play a part in simple 'round-virtual-table' face to face discussion without the disruption of screen sharing.

Create as many pages as you need and move between them with a scroll of your mouse.

Furthermore, the content of the virtual flipchart pages can instantly be distributed via emails to everyone at the meeting, and/or it can be send as sticky-notes to any of the other tools and techniques you might be using (for grouping, sorting, voting, display, off-line work, syndicates etc.)

Use cases: Capture ideas in a brainstorm; Record different perspectives in a discussion; Put ideas into the parking lot; Sketch out an idea or explanation; Create simple tools (like SWOT) within it; ... basically, anything you would use a real flipchart for.

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.