Library of facilitation techniques

You can help groups reflect on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict.

It is possible for every voice to be heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction. Progressing in stages makes this practical—from collecting facts about What Happened to making sense of these facts with So What and finally to what actions logically follow with Now What. The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do. Voila!

The connection between walking and enhanced creativity has a long history. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1889) wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”. New research has backed up what many have thought for centuries with data, quantifying the effect of walking on human thought. Researchers at Stanford recently found that walking outside led to almost 3 times as many creative ideas as sitting indoors.

This is a simple drama game in which participants take turns asking each other “What are you doing?” and acting out the various responses. Though simple, it engages the imagination and gently challenges participants out of their comfort zone by having them mime a range of different actions.

A speculative prompt-based activity that encourages participants to explore alternative futures by asking bold or unexpected "what if" questions. This method invites imaginative thinking and helps loosen assumptions about how the future has to unfold.

using defamiliarzation is one of the best ways of drawing attention of people, posing problems and making them contemplate about the problem in hand. hence this brief activity is a

Reach a consensus by grouping user stories according to scope.

Distribute participants in space (or if online, on a whiteboard) to quickly capture some aspects of the group: where are participants from? How familiar are they with the topic? What are their backgrounds?

Come up with the world's worst way to approach something. Play as a game and/or use to generate productive ideas

Establish pattern to pass in a circle. Create a category that each person has a contribution (ie. breakfast cereals). Add another category. 

A process for understanding a complex problem situation