Library of facilitation techniques

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Featured Author – International Association of Facilitators

IAF is a worldwide community of facilitators promoting excellence in the use of professional group process facilitation to create engagement and impact.

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104 results

Methods (104)

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I Love You Honey...

A simple and short group game all about trying to make each other crack a smile. Participants take turns in the middle, trying to convince another participant to smile using only the like “I love you honey, won’t you give me a smile?” The game generates laughter and helps groups build trust and openness through play.

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Kanban Pizza Game

This Pizza Game is a great way for new or established teams to understand the principles of Lean & Agile by diving into Kanban in a quick and fun way that is hard to communicate through words alone. It teaches you how to get from an existing process to a Kanban system, how to visualize the system, and start modifying it.

The Pizza Game enables the teams to have a hands-on experience feeling the pains, gains, frustrations, and fun throughout the process - and to reflect on improvements that the participants can share back in their workplace. Bonus: you get to make (paper or digital) Pizza!

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Letter to Myself

Often done at the end of a workshop or program, the purpose of this exercise is to support participants in applying their insights and learnings, by writing a letter and sending it to their future selves. They can define key actions that they would like their future self to take, and express their reasons why change needs to happen.

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Mapping Organizational Culture

As a leader or manager in a large organization, you probably have a sense of the culture and people challenges facing you, but at the same time, you must also manage not only down but up and across the organization.

Culture Mapping gives you the intelligent information you require to make a business case for the interventions, executive support, and budget you will need to minimize risk and maximize the chances of success for your change initiative.

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Marshmallow Challenge

A team-building activity in which teams must compete to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. It emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, collaboration, innovation and problem solving strategy. The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. Visit the Marshmallow Challenge website for more information.

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MethodKit for Team Development

In the age of digital, we still use analogue tools for meetings and workshops, with blank canvases like whiteboards, flip charts and notebooks as the rule. Why start from zero every time? Instead, MethodKit has collected the most important bits and pieces to get you started, and to further develop your ideas. A framework that allows creativity. What you create is up to you. MethodKit for Team Development is an analogue tool designed to help you structure and organise your teamwork for greater effectiveness, creativity and results. Built around a versatile set of cards, the kit can be used in a range of ways, from project kick-off workshops, to team reflections, coaching sessions and more.

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Personal SWOB Assessment

A versatile workshop for personal assessment and action planning, in which participants use the SWOB model (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Barriers) to assess themselves, reflect upon key areas for development and create a concise action plan. It includes an interactive component, in which participants work in small groups coaching each other to make their action plans as clear and achievable as possible.

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Principles of Effective Feedback

The purpose of this exercise is for a group to discuss, define, and come to agreement around key principles of effective feedback. Participants discuss examples of effective and ineffective feedback in pairs, then work together to define “effective feedback.” Then, as a group, they create a list of principles that they will aim to work by.

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Project Mid-way Evaluation

This method is useful for evaluating a project currently in progress, to see if any adjustments need to be made for the team to work more effectively together. It provides a framework for discussion. Participants focus on the things that are helping and hindering the team process, and create action steps for improvement.

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Protobot

One of the best ways to explore creativity is through building. Simple low fidelity prototypes can allow us to transform simple (and at times complex) ideas into something physical. In doing so we inevitably open a space for continuing to explore, reevaluate and iterate.

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Quantify Yourself

If curiosity and empathy can be a driver of creativity, there is no reason why they need be restricted to the observation of others. A range of technologies increasingly allow us to track, monitor and in doing so discover things about our own behaviours. Much of creativity is centred on making visible the invisible and for this reason spending time experimenting tools which allow us to do this may help us reflect on the potential for digital tools to be part of our creative toolbox.