Facilitation Techniques and Workshop Activities | Library

Who is in the room? Sociometrics

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?

Take as much as you need

get-to-know icebreaker energizer teampedia

This simple activity is designed to have each person share things about himself or herself with the group after receiving a gift.

Learning Matrix

gamestorming agile retrospective

Iteration retrospective activities are tricky; it is often difficult to think of practical improvements, and reflecting on negative aspects of the project can leave your team feeling upset and unmotivated. A great way to prevent these from occurring is to play a game that focuses on the positives while also pointing out aspects that need to be changed. As described in Diana Larsen and Esther Derby’s Agile Retrospectives, Learning Matrix does just this.

Human Knot

A physical-participation disentanglement puzzle that helps a group learn how to work together (self-organize) and can be used to illustrate the difference between self-organization and command-control management or simply as a get-to-know-you icebreaker. Standing in a circle, group members reach across to connect hands with different people. The group then tries to unravel the “human knot” by unthreading their bodies without letting go of each other people’s hands.

As a management-awareness game to illustrate required change in behavior and leadership on a management level (e.g., illustrate the change from ‘task-oriented’ management towards ‘goal/value-oriented’ management).