Library of facilitation techniques

🔍The Canvas of Collaboration and Clarity

BIG PICTURE is more than just a facilitation tool; it's a gateway to enhanced team collaboration and a deeper understanding of your business environment. Envisioned as a dynamic canvas, it encompasses essential business areas like Purpose, Marketing, Sales, Operations, Customer Care, Suppliers, and Partners, all interwoven with the intricate journey of your Customers. Through this innovative platform, Teams use Symbols—Team, Customer, Technology, Measure, Money, Process, Challenge, Opportunity—to visually express ideas, identify challenges, and share insights.

A Narrative of Business Ecosystem

In the landscape of complex business dynamics, BIG PICTURE stands as a unifying force. It's not just about symbol placement; it's about storytelling and connection. As team members engage with this tool, they unravel the interconnected nature of their roles and the broader business context. It's an exploration that reveals hidden connections, spurs creative solutions to challenges, and shines a light on new opportunities. BIG PICTURE is the catalyst for developing a shared language that transcends departmental boundaries, fostering a more cohesive and strategic team dialogue.

Integrating BIG PICTURE into your facilitation approach transforms session planning into a dynamic and interactive experience, enriching your toolkit with a visual dimension that simplifies complex concepts and enhances participant engagement.

🔍 A Journey of Self-Discovery and Team Togetherness

The "Getting to Know YOU" icebreaker is a dynamic resource designed to unravel the layers of team dynamics and individual roles within an organisation. It's a unique blend of personal reflection and collective exploration, powered by the BIG PICTURE framework. This tool uses simple yet powerful symbols – Team, Customer, Technology, Measure, Money, Process, Challenge, Opportunity – to facilitate a dialogue that's both fun and thought-provoking. The essence of BIG PICTURE here is not in its comprehensive business modeling but in how these symbols help team members express and understand their roles and perceptions within the broader organisational context.

Participants engage with these Symbols, reflecting on which ones resonate with their personal and professional identities. This process of reflection and sharing is designed to foster a deeper understanding of not only individual roles but also how these roles interweave to form the fabric of the organisation. It's an exercise that brings to light the diverse perspectives and strengths within a team, encouraging a culture of openness and shared insight.

The 'Getting to Know YOU' Resource transforms standard icebreakers into dynamic sessions rich in personal connection, team cohesion, and a deeper understanding of each symbol's role in business, fostering both individual insight and collective accountability.

🔍 Embracing Self-Discovery: The "Getting to Know Your Role" Icebreaker

This is a uniquely designed icebreaker activity that serves as a powerful catalyst for self-reflection and team communication. This resource, set against the backdrop of the BIG PICTURE Board, is tailored to deepen the understanding of individual roles within an organisation. It's not just about breaking the ice; it’s an exploration into how each team member perceives their contribution and how they interact with the broader business landscape. By engaging in this activity, participants embark on a journey to uncover the value they add and the dynamics of their workplace relationships.

This icebreaker leverages the BIG PICTURE Board to visually map these insights, making abstract concepts tangible. The Board's design, encompassing various aspects of a business, provides a structured yet flexible platform for this exploration. Participants use the board to position themselves within the organisation, leading to revelations about alignment with team goals, potential areas of misalignment, and opportunities for growth. The simplicity of the BIG PICTURE approach amplifies the effectiveness of the "Getting to Know Your Role" activity, making it an essential tool in any facilitator's repertoire.

Dropping 'Getting to Know Your Role' in your workshop planning offers a structured yet flexible approach to session design, enabling facilitators to create more engaging, introspective, and impactful experiences that deepen team understanding and cohesion.

This is an exercise to use when the group gets stuck in details and struggles to see the big picture. Also good for defining a vision.

A method to capture notes and reflections in hybrid events

This workshop aims to help participants define, decide and achieve their goals. By supporting participants to envision where they want to be in a number of years on a holistic level, and defining the steps that will take them there, participants get a clearer picture of the action they need to take.

In a brain-pick activity, participants interview people who share a common experience or background. (These people are called informants.) Participants interact with these informants—and with each other—to collect and organize useful information.

This activity uses people who have undergone major organizational changes. Participants interview them to come up with a list of guidelines for coping with change.

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You can help a large group of people identify obstacles and opportunities for spreading ideas or innovations at many levels. Panarchy enables people to visualize how systems are embedded in systems and helps them understand how these interdependencies influence the spread of change. Participants become more alert to small changes that can help spread ideas up to other system levels; they learn how shifts at larger or lower system levels may release resources to assist them at another level. With better appreciation of the Ecocycle dynamics at play, the group creates “opportunity windows” for innovations to spread among levels and across boundaries.

This exercise is great for building empathy amongst team members, and giving each participant a deeper understanding of their colleagues’ backgrounds (particularly great for international or remote teams). It'll also set a casual atmosphere for the workshop ahead.

Any creative endeavour can generate a certain amount of anxiety. The first step is always the hardest… has anyone not heard that before?

In his book ‘Being Creative’, Michael Avatar suggests that we draw inspiration from the Zen Buddhist idea of the 'beginner's mind' - where everything is beginning. In a beginner's mind there is possibility, openness, curiosity: all qualities that are useful for an exploration of creativity. This activity is a short, grounding ideation and exploration that taps into the beginner's mind.