Library of facilitation techniques

Here's another jolt that explores one of our favorite themes: You have to unlearn something old in order to learn something new. A nice thing about this brief activity is that you don't need any supplies or equipment.

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.

Triads is a structured sharing activity for identifying the advantages and disadvantages of an object (examples: iPad, chicken soup) or a process (examples: meditation, conflict management). It also enables the participants to leverage the advantages and to reduce the disadvantages.

In any content area, one difference between a beginner and an expert is the latter's ability to come up with different examples that belong to the same category. This activity strengthens your ability to come up with examples of communication concepts.

To explore how it feels to be excluded—and to be excluding.

Here's what the three letters of the acronym stand for: constructive, immediate, and active. Whenever someone shares some news about positive things that happened to her, react constructively, immediately, and actively. This strengthens your relationship and makes both of you happy. To learn more about this approach, read the handout at the end of the game instructions.

Even though Three Questions takes just a few minutes, it provokes the participants into reflecting for a long time.

Two teams separately prepare and act out the same basic roleplay. Other participants watch these role-plays, compare the two versions, and evaluate them.

Here's a control-group jolt in which we compare the performance of three different groups.