The Action Board is one of our favorite exercises at AJ&Smart. If you haven’t tried it before, you should definitely give it a go in a meeting with your team or client. This exercise is super helpful for getting a group to make a decision on something when trying to decide between a few ideas. In the video, we go over exactly how to run this exercise and we have a real example that uses sticky notes from an actual client workshop we ran recently. So you get to see a how the Action Board exercise flows and what the end result looked like. Would love your feedback on this video and would also love to know if there are any other videos that you’d like us to work on.

Hi All. I’ll be doing a series of team building workshops based on the 5 dysfunctions of a team model. It’s with an intact team of 12. I’d love ideas and exercises you’ve used to introduce the model that have worked well. This is intended to be a series of 7, 90 minute sessions. I’m kicking off this week! Thank you!

Hey Facilitators👋 I wanted to share this exercise with you all. I love to kick my workshops off using a very simple exercise called 'Hopes and Fears'. This exercise is used in various contexts, such as team meetings, workshops, or group discussions. It's a great way for you as a Facilitator to set and get expectations from the participants right from the beginning! This is how you run it 👇 1️⃣ All you need is a whiteboard and you as the facilitator will divide the board in two categories; Hopes and Fears. 2️⃣ Give each participant a sharpie and two blocks of sticky notes. Make sure the two blocks of stickies are different colours e.g. blue for hopes, yellow for fears. 3️⃣ Encourage participants to write all their hopes or positive expectations about a particular project, idea, or situation. One idea per sticky! Stick them in the 'hopes' section of the board. 4️⃣ Encourage participants to share one or two 'hopes' each. 5️⃣ Repeat the same process for the Fears. This exercise helps team members express their feelings, align their perspectives, and build trust by understanding everyone's viewpoints before diving into solving the challenge at hand. Try it in your workshops! It's really nice. Let me know if you have any other nice exercises or activities that you like to use to kick off your workshops 😊

I am doing a presentation at a conference next week and am having trouble being sure that I am ending strongly. What are some of your favorite ways to end strong when you will have VERY limited time. The whole presentation is an hour and I have built in several Q/As. There will be 50 in the meeting (much larger than I had anticipated.) So, any ideas on how to end stronger?

I have to do a happy dance! I just completed my first Lightning Decision Jam workshop with a couple I'm working with! I followed @Rebecca Courtney's suggestion at our last Q&A call and had them "Draw Your Neighbor" for an icebreaker and they loved it! It was messy because I haven't quite figured out Miro (it was a virtual session) so I ended up having them say aloud what they wrote on a note pad for me to type in the digital post its - BUT - this was still faster and more fun and flowing than what I would have done to mindmap in the past. We had votes on 4 items, determined which to start with, and they had their 'To Do' list for the next week! We all enjoyed it and I will never go back to traditional brainstorming again! So so so much appreciation for the team here at AJ&Smart for being so generous and world class with your content! Learning so so much!! Many thanks 💛🙏🏾💛🙏🏾