Library of facilitation techniques

Leadership and Personal Development Group Activities

Activities to support personal development and train new soft skills. Help your participants to reflect, grow self-awareness and learn new interpersonal skills.
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Hyper Island

Feedback: Current Strongest Impression

Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be conducted with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics. This is a good first feedback exercise. It supports individuals to try out giving and receiving a very basic form of feedback in a safe way.

Thiagi Group

Lasting Impression Elevator Pitch

How do you explain what you do to someone you meet for the first time and make a lasting impression? Being able to explain what you do may result in a career spurt—or at least help you avoid some embarrassment. Participants write a short pitch they can use to introduce themselves to clients or new acquaintances or to make unscheduled presentations. Later, they have the pitch critiqued and improved using a three-part rating system.
Thiagi Group

Angry Customers

Training Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to handle angry and abusive customers is a tough challenge. Effective communication with an angry customer requires a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. As a part of our training session, we use this rapid roleplay activity.
Hyper Island

Feedback Mingle

The Feedback Mingle is an exercise in which every member in a group gives feedback to every other member in the group. Often used as a closing activity, it aims to facilitate feedback, generate positive energy and create a sense of team.

Thiagi Group

Clear Communication

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.

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Thiagi Group

Quick-Change Artists

In these days of constant change, adaptability and resilience are highly desirable personal qualities. This activity enables the participants to tap into their group wisdom and work on their ability to flourish under frequent changes. Participants work individually, with a partner, and in teams to prepare a list of do's and don't-s for increasing their ability to adapt to changes. Eventually, each participant selects a factor that he or she wants to apply immediately.
Hyper Island

Feedback Map

This is a feedback exercise to support participants to deliver feedback that is clear and specific, especially after working in multiple project teams over a longer period of time. The team maps the connections between individuals, then uses specific points of interaction to prompt feedback.

Liberating Structures

Drawing Together

You can help people access hidden knowledge such as feelings, attitudes, and patterns that are difficult to express with words. When people are tired, their brains are full, and they have reached the limits of logical thinking, you can help them evoke ideas that lie outside logical, step-by-step understanding of what is possible. Stories about individual or group transformations can be told with five easy-to-draw symbols that have universal meanings. The playful spirit of drawing together signals that more is possible and many new answers are expected. Drawing Together cuts through the culture of overreliance on what people say and write that constrains the emergence of novelty. It also provides a new avenue of expression for some people whose ideas would otherwise not surface.

Thiagi Group

Thirty-five for Debriefing

You might be familiar with Thirty-Five as a structured-sharing activity. Thirty-Five can also be used as an effective debriefing game.

In this version, participants reflect on an earlier experience and identify important lessons they learned. They write one of these lessons as a brief item. The winner in this activity is not the best player, but the best lesson learned.

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