Library of facilitation techniques

Workshop activities to Analyse, Understand and Innovate

Tools and techniques to analyse and understand complex situations, to unleash creativity and to discover new insights. Make sure your group explores the situation at hand and all participants get a thorough understanding before moving on to make decisions.
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Thiagi Group

The Creativity Dice

Too much linear thinking is hazardous to creative problem solving. To be creative, you should approach the problem (or the opportunity) from different points of view. You should leave a thought hanging in mid-air and move to another. This skipping around prevents premature closure and lets your brain incubate one line of thought while you consciously pursue another.
Liberating Structures

Celebrity Interview

You can enable a large group of people to connect with a leader or an expert (the celebrity) as a person and grasp the nuances of how that person is approaching a challenge. With a well-designed interview, you can turn what would otherwise be a passive, often boring presentation into a personal narrative that is entertaining, imparts valuable knowledge, and reveals the full range of rational, emotional, and ethical/moral dynamics at play. You can often turn the interview into an invitation to action, drawing out all the elements needed to spark the participant group’s imagination and encourage cohesive action.

Hyper Island

User Day-parting

This exercise supports a user-centred approach to product and service innovation. Teams create an imaginary user (a persona), map out an average day in his or her life, and identify the challenges that he or she experiences. Teams then use this to brainstorm new products or services that could help with those challenges. Finally, sketches or prototypes of the best ideas are quickly developed presented back to for feedback.

Liberating Structures

Panarchy

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.

Gamestorming methods

Show me your values

Instead of talking about values that are underlying of the organizations' employees are encouraged to show these values as pictures from magazines. This way it is easier to show, tell and understand perceptions.

Gamestorming methods

Spectrum Mapping

Spectrum mapping is designed to reveal the diversity of perspectives and options around any given topic and to organize them into a meaningful spectrum. It’s valuable because it unearths information that plays a role in attitudes and behaviours that otherwise may not be visible.

Thiagi Group

Back to Back

This is an energetic improv game that can be used anytime during a training session. My favourite time to use it is at the end of a session for debriefing. Participants pair up and stand back-to-back. The facilitator asks a question. The participants turn around and face each other and take turns sharing their responses.
Hyper Island

Systems Thinking: The Iceberg Model

Systems thinking is a way of approaching problems that asks how various elements within a system — which could be an ecosystem, an organization, or something more dispersed such as a supply chain — influence one another. Rather than reacting to individual problems that arise, a systems thinker will ask about relationships to other activities within the system, look for patterns over time, and seek root causes.