Library of facilitation techniques

The Product box is a classic from the Agile games line. The kind of typical workshop that turns an austere meeting room into a middle school classroom. In the usual version, this game needs a few accessories: A4 cardboard boxes, scissors, glue, stickers, and the participant’s imagination... This workshop definitely requires some logistical support. It takes about 2 hours to complete and you need one facilitator to manage 6 to 12 participants max.

Teams are asked to imagine that this product will be sold in a department store, just like another everyday product. As they imagine the product, they make decisions about its name, a slogan, a logo and 3 or 4 key selling points on the front of the packaging. And on the back of the packaging: a detailed description, the prerequisites and the conditions of use.

A fun and reliable technique for scoring many ideas, with instant visual results. Participants rate statements by dropping tokens in Feedback Frames in a range of slots that are hidden by a cover, with results later revealed as a visual graph of opinions. This simple in-person analog tool uses secret score voting to recognize nuanced gradients of agreement towards consensus and avoid traditional voting problems such as groupthink and vote-splitting, which are common in sticker dot voting.

Simple, classic brainstorming with two variants. Popcorn - where participants speak out-loud and Round Robin - where participants work in silence and pass their ideas to the next person in turn. 

The Diffusion Curve is a reflection and discussion activity based on the theory of the diffusion of innovations. Using the basic principles of the diffusion curve, the activity aims to have participants reflect on the question: in which areas of my life am I: an innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, or laggard? It can also be extended to have participants apply the same lens to the organizations or companies they work for.

Impulse (also known as Pass the Pulse) is a great exercise for teamwork and breaking the ice at the same time.

Quick way to narrow down a decision

An energiser to loosen up people

Images have the ability to spark insights and to create new associations and possible connections. That is why pictures help generate new ideas, which is exactly the point of this exercise.

You already know a lot about factors that increase and decrease people's trustworthiness. This is because ever since you were a baby, you have learned through experience who to trust and who to distrust. This activity asks you to think about six people and decide why you trust or distrust them.

In a brain-pick activity, participants interview people who share a common experience or background. (These people are called informants.) Participants interact with these informants—and with each other—to collect and organize useful information.

This activity uses people who have undergone major organizational changes. Participants interview them to come up with a list of guidelines for coping with change.

Polarities live as interdependent pairs that need each other to exist, for example inhaling & exhaling. One pole is not valued as better than the other. Polarities have an enduring quality, they are unavoidable and unsolvable.

Polarities live everywhere from our internal dialogue to external patterns of relating in society and within organizations. Overfocus on any one pole leads to the breakdown of the system as a whole.

The intention of the diversity welcome is inclusion. It can be long or short. The common element is to inclusively name a range of possibilities with a genuine “Welcome!”