Library of facilitation techniques

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.

Purpose: People and Teams need to reflect as part of learning and innovation. Reflection can reveal strengths and areas for improvement. During the transition from one year to the next, we tend to focus on what's coming up in the new year.

Planning ahead and creating goals is important, but let's not forget to reflect on the previous year to learn from our experiences and get focused and deliberate about the future choices we make. After the Reflection, there is a gratitude and intention-setting option.

Use Craig Raine's poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.

Brief active response during a presentation or (shudder) lecture, can take 2 minutes or 10, can be silent or voiced.

A powerful tool to gain deep insights in the structure of the ecosystem.

Arguments, presentations, strategies, or other plans are sent to other teams for deconstruction in order to find gaps or problems.

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

Individuals express their response to a statement or idea by standing closer or further from a central object. Used with teams to reveal system, hidden patterns, perspectives.

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.

A fun, dynamic game useful for introducing topics related to decision making, conflict resolution, win-win scenarios and the importance of clear communication of goals.

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.