Library of facilitation techniques

You may be a trustworthy computer programmer but nobody may trust your ability to manage a project. You may trust your surgeon to do brain surgery—but not to give you financial advice.

Trustworthy differentiates behaviors and traits that contribute to trustworthiness in different situations (such as predictability) and other behaviors and traits that are limited to specific situations (such as surgical expertise).

This is a great activity to show the power of "now" which we usually underestimate.

Here's a jolt that can be conducted within 99 seconds, raising awarness of our automatic stereotyping processes.

You already know a lot about factors that increase and decrease people's trustworthiness. This is because ever since you were a baby, you have learned through experience who to trust and who to distrust. This activity asks you to think about six people and decide why you trust or distrust them.

Here's a quick jolt that helps participants discover basic psychological facts about our memory.

The use of lectures for training adults has several advantages and several disadvantages. So does the use of training games. What if we combine these two approaches in a complementary fashion? That is the idea behind interactive lectures.

Interactive lectures involve participants in the learning process while providing complete control to the instructor. These activities enable a quick and easy conversion of a passive presentation into an interactive experience. Different types of interactive lectures incorporate built-in quizzes, interspersed tasks, teamwork interludes, and participant control of the presentation.

One effective approach to adding interactivity to lectures involves requiring participants to review what they heard and summarize the key points. This approach reinforces learning and improves recall.

Missing Sentence provides an intriguing twist to an interactive lecture that is based on the review-and-summary strategy.

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.

You can use Whispers as a follow-up activity to any interesting experience among a group of friends. It's my favorite game to informally debrief my colleagues at the airport or during the drive back after a conference.