Library of facilitation techniques

One of the most important concepts in the workplace is trust. It affects performance, informal and formal relations, atmosphere of the workplace etc. With this activitiy you cn discover what one thinks about trust.

Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.

Five Ideas is an activity that encourages participants to go beyond what is good for their team or their department and work on cooperatively achieving common goals.

Teambuilding activities create high-performance teams whose members are extremely loyal to each other and to their team. Sometimes, however, the emphasis in teamwork results in reduced collaboration across teams. Similar problems occur when employees become so focused on their departmental goals that they ignore or downplay the strategic goals for the total organization.

An emotional journey is a visualization that maps and illustrates a user’s emotional experience through the experience of interacting with an organization, product or brand.

One person rants for 60 seconds. The second person translates their rant into what they care about and value.

The purpose of reflecting as a team is for members to express thoughts, feelings and opinions about a shared experience, to build openness and trust in the team, and to draw out key learnings and insights to take forward into subsequent experiences. Team members generally sit in a circle, reflecting first as individuals, sharing those reflections with the group, then discussing the insights and potential actions to take out of the session. Use this session one or more times throughout a project or program.

This opening activity works well for topics that deal with the challenges of change. It is adapted from an activity developed and used by Crestcom, a management and leadership development company.

The 20/20 Vision game is about getting group clarity around which projects or initiatives should be more of a priority than others. Because employees’ attention is so often divided among multiple projects, it can be refreshing to refocus and realign more intently with the projects that have the biggest bang for the buck. And defining the “bang” together helps ensure that the process of prioritization is quality.

It is a great activity to show participants that it is plausible to change our automatic behaviours and reactions to annoying situations.

The activity serves as a brief energiser during a workshop, and helps to get creativity flowing. At the end of this method, each team member will be a little more familiar with each other.