Library of facilitation techniques

In this simple closing activity, participants will share two things: an action they'll take as a result of the meeting and an action they'll take to replenish themselves.

Use this fabulous ice breaker to see the diverse perspectives of your group using creative prompts. The activity allows the team to create a quick and fun image of a fictional monster using generative AI using only 3 characteristics.

Mostly this is great for an online workshop, but with a little supervision it can be pretty cool in an in-person session.

We live and work in turbulent times, juggling never-ending to-do lists, back-to-back meetings, and constant context switching. When people enter a meeting, they often carry mental clutter – unfinished tasks, lingering thoughts, or stress from the previous discussion.

This simple yet effective exercise helps participants mentally transition into the meeting by externalizing their distractions, physically letting them go, and creating a fresh focus for the discussion ahead. I use this whenever I sense a group (whether virtual or in-person) is distracted, overwhelmed, or coming straight from another meeting. It works well when combined with a check-in question that gets everyone speaking.

Empathy, role clarity

This poem can help bridge diversity in a group.

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.

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.