Hello facilitators, I was asked by a friend to help out with the above theme. What is the best way to approach this if you have done this before ? I need ideas on exercises and how to plan … Thank you

Hey folks 👋 I recently shared a playful article on Medium that sparked a fantastic idea for icebreakers in our workshops. Imagine attendees discovering the unique sounds hidden within their own names, just like I did with mine! ❓ What? Here's a quick recap of my Medium post: 'Ö': Pronounce it like the 'ea' in 'early.' Regardless of your accent, this sound is universal. Think of 'early,' focus on 'ea,' and you're halfway there! 'mür': This one's a breeze if you've ever said 'mural.' Picture yourself admiring a beautiful wall painting, saying 'mur-al,' and you've almost got it. Combine and Conquer: Put 'ea' and 'mur' together, say it quickly, and you've got my name — Ömür! It's like a mini tongue twister, but mastering it is worth it. Why Does It Matter?: Correctly pronouncing names is a nod to heritage and cultural diversity. It's a small gesture that makes a big difference. Challenge: Can you guess the meaning of 'Ömür' with the hint from the image? No cheating with translators! 💡 How might we turn this into an exercise? Here's a possible structured flow for the exercise: 1️⃣ Introduction (2 minutes): - Welcome attendees and explain the purpose of the exercise. - Set a positive and inclusive tone for the activity. 2️⃣ Name Placement (2 minutes): - Provide prepared places (cards, sticky notes, or a digital platform) for everyone to write their names. - Ensure each participant has a clear space to work with. 3️⃣ Analyzing Names (5-10 minutes): - Instruct participants to split their names into sounds (e.g., Ö-mür). - For each sound, they’ll find sample English words that resemble the pronunciation (e.g., 'Ö': (ea)rly). - Encourage participants to use example words as a guide. - Display these on a shared board or screen for reference. 4️⃣ Image Hint (3 minutes): - Participants will provide an image hint related to their name’s meaning. - Ensure everyone can see the images clearly.

Hi everyone! 😀I’m looking for some activity ideas for a team workshop which promotes becoming “lean”. Does anyone have any experiences in holding “lean activities/games”?

Hey there! 😃 A client have asked me to deliver a Design Thinking workshop for a group of 6 leaders that work in a company related to environment and sustainability. They what to use the Design Thinking workshop to define solutions on how to create team cohesion through all the different teams they have in the company. In total they are 6 leaders + 20 employees. I was wondering if the workshop could be delivered in 4 sessions of 4 hours each? What do you think?

Hi everyone. Does anyone have a FUN icebreaker to kick off a 2-day HR offsite with the entire team? I have 30 minutes. If possible, I’d like to tie in themes around collaboration. Thank you in advance for your ideas. Jennie

Project Lessons Learned - How To Reflect and Learn In An One Hour Session You run a project and at one moment in time, you figure out you could have learned from some situations and act differently next time. How about doing a "Lessons Learned" session either in the middle of the project or at the end? It was last year when I was asked to come up with a short session where one team could reflect upon their learnings during their project. The request was to be able to run in ONE HOUR. Wow, I said, this is really hard! I usually need sessions of a minimum of 1,5 hours to be able to run a session similar to a retrospective. And now one hour? I was thinking of having some kind of Mentimeter word cloud, to ‘read the room’ fast so I created one in Miro or with sticky notes in person. Then I went through the reflection part, decided, and committed. It went super cool in one hour and the participants were so amazed at how much they could do in this time. Afterwards, I was iterating on it in person, online and this initial version was the best one. This is why I decided to share it after trying it out with other teams as well. Here you can find the exact steps in Miroverse: https://miro.com/miroverse/project-lessons-learned-template/ I used the amazing learning cards from Strategyzer which work smoothly every time with the participants and have a great impact! If you like it, give it some love in Miroverse please :) ❤️ Let me know if you use it and how it works for you :)

hey everyone! I will facilitate a two day workshop with a leadership team (9 people) where they will decide on - The 3 year goal for the organisation - What initiatives to invest in that are aligned with the goal? - How to best structure the org in order to deliver these initiatives? The size of the engineering organization is around 140 engineers. The third bullet point above will include questions such as: - Does the current team structure still make sense - Should we merge currently separate teams (i.e. operations) with the engineering teams - Do the teams have the right skills needed for the new initiatives or do we need to move team members around I'm thinking about using the meddlers game from management 3.0 in order to guide the reorg discussion and visualize the potential new team structure. I've never done this before, so I'm open to any other suggestions from the community. Does anyone of you have experience in facilitating a reorg discussion? Any cool activities you would suggest? Thanks! Toby

If you’ve been wanting to introduce your team to workshopping but have been struggling to get the ball rolling, I have just the thing for you.. give this a watch and let me know what you think.

Hey all, I'm currently designing a workshop for a big corporate client. The ideal outcome is alignment over key areas they could explore for innovation tracks (read: corporate ventures). I have 1 day for this workshop to define the areas, and 2x 1/2 day in a bigger group to actually come up with venture ideas WITHIN the defined areas. I don't like to use canvases, but in this case I'm keen on trying a variation of the context canvas in order to grasp the context of the business (it's a big chemical company), converge by selecting key 'forces' they think are important in their context, and then brainwrite opportunity areas in the afternoon. I'm trying to keep it super simple, but since it's a complex company it might feel like it's a bit too simple... I'm wondering if anyone else did a similar exercise before?

Hey Workshoppers, We just released a full video guide on how to run an OKR workshop, including the Miro template! Thanks to @Johan Holst for the amazing work on this one! I love how It turned out. Cheers, Jonathan and the AJ&Smart Team

Hey all, I wondered if anyone has any experience with getting leads / finding ways to do free workshops for practice with Charities and any other types of organisations to practice running them in a safe space so to speak. My head runs into a wall when thinking about it as I don't know what type of workshops would be 'sellable' to an NGO for volunteering as an example.

Are you interested in creative and inclusive facilitation methods combining brain and hands, playfully working on and solving serious challenges? Then you might come to Impact Hub Zürich Colab next Monday on November 27 for a Makers Play - LEGO® Serious Play® Taster Session. https://zurich.impacthub.ch/event/makers-play-lego-serious-play-taster-session-on-november-27-2023/

A Consultant in my team just called and asked if I had any suggestions för exercises for a team of 90 people to get to know eachother a bit better. Their facilitator called in sick today, they planned to have a 90 min workshop tomorrow, now they have a gap they need to make use of but do not have a lot of time to spend on planning advanced facilitation. They have 90 min available, they are a team from Sweden and Norway within IT. They have a friendly atmosphere, there are variations of how much the know eachother. They are in a room with traditional stage and people sitting in rows facing the stage. No avalability of breakout rooms. They have space to mingle. The results do not have to be used for anything afterwards, they just want to get to know each other better. Thank you in advance!

Dear fellows, I'm sitting at a new concept around team communication and would be happy if you would like to share your best exercise and ideas around the topic - Improve team communication Thanks in advance 😍

Hey! Linus here. I saw @Jonathan Courtney's post about the "sense of urgency" lacking in people who never get anywhere. I see that all the time, but from two completely different perspectives. 1. The professional who eased into a state of "fat cat" (always works in a mid-large organization). 2. The young gun with 200% ambition but no clear focus (vision) so a roadmap is impossible to commit to. For both, I have a similar "first-step" meeting. I recorded a generic version for this community, hope it can help you, or the people you try to get into a growth mindset!

Hey Community In my job in different larger companies as C-Level Member (Executive) I was always wondering, why there is so much waste on unimportant things. I hardly tried to change - but honestly: all the board members (deciders) did not want to change anything, as the want to have all under control. Same experience I made in Start Up - the more investors get onboarded, the more wast was generated. So: I think, if we achieve to formulate the problem, how we solve the problem and at the end how we contribute to a potential competitive advantage, the more chances will we have to sell facilitation and workshops. What are your thoughts about that?

So- thank you all for the feedback on my previous post regarding ideas for my first workshop! 🙏🏻 so much appreciation from this ! Well, tonight- I had my first one ever made, since graduating from my innovation and entrepreneurship education - and wow- what an experience, with so much to learn from ❤️ My heart is bubbling of joy and pride ! I used the framework- with minor alterations from the workshop let’s playbook, such as the data collection was initiated 14 days prior the workshop- and I joined some Of the tasks to one, due to time 🙈 But- all in all, such a great experience- loads of leaning going forward- and a lot of good input/feedback from the group - and resulted in 2 very valuable and critical working commitments! So thank you all for contributing and helping me to getting the strength and confidence to do so- and not being a complete nervous wreck, but noticing my improvement issues during the workshop- but improvising and pulling through ! ❤️❤️ This community is just absolutely amazing and awesome- and I already shared and praised it to loads of other innovative kindred spirits ❤️❤️ Wishes of a great evening and keep up the awesomeness- to improve the world, one step at a time 😎🥳🙏🏻🥰

Hey Guys, I recently had a cool chat with Dee Scarano on my podcast UXYZ. In this episode, I learned that she doesn’t stick to the usual 4-step sketch when she facilitates a Design Sprint. (She also shared some other facilitation secrets — trust me, it’s worth a listen! ). Instead, she substitutes some of the classical steps with an exercise of her own creation, that she named “the Remix exercise.” As workshopper lovers, I thought that you could be interested by this little hack. Let me know what you think :)

Hi all, I have to facilitate a learning event as part of my L&D qualification. My chosen topic is difficult conversations. The purpose of the session is to inform participants on how to approach tricky conversations and the steps and principles involved. The goal is to walk away with a useful toolkit, some new knowledge and the belief that participants can manage difficult conversations with confidence. I have about 60-90 minutes and only 3 participants! Does anyone have any exercise ideas? Many thanks

Hello - I facilitate a lot of team discussions related to strategic planning. Wondering if anyone can share exercises they've done to help a team identify and determine their KPIs besides brainstorming?

Hello, fellow facilitators! What types of exercises would you recommend for action planning that include clear tasks, deadlines, and designated task owners?

I read the book “From Contempt To Curiosity - Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling” by Caitlin Walker and I had some takeaways that I apply already in my sessions about it here. How clean language can help teams bond through metaphors and specific questions? Which questions would help a team reflect upon their values and how to work together as ONE TEAM? In many cases, teams are formed and they are supposed to work together with the best performance and produce fast results. How could they do this if they do not take the time to reflect upon their values, ways of collaborating, and what kind of work fits them as one team? One of my preferred ways to help a team become a TEAM is to guide them in finding their values. In this way, they avoid starting point conflicts and broken collaboration. I use powerful questions and Playmobil Pro in situations that fit the team. Here are some questions inspired by Caitlin Walker’s book that are helpful for this and help reflection through metaphors: - “What could be a model or metaphor that encapsulates all the things that are most important to you as individuals in a team?” - “When you’re working at your best, you’re like what?” - “An ideal team for you, that would support you to work at your best, would be like what?” An example when I used a metaphor to create a safe environment for a teambuilding: I did not know back then that it was clean language, but I knew it was a reflection based on a metaphor. I was co-facilitating a team building and the starting point of that afternoon was an invitation to the participants to complete the sentence “Our Team Is Like…” The idea was that the participants would find their pair through a little game, and then take some moments to think and share the end of that sentence and why with each other.

Hi everybody, great to be here and to start my facilitating journey! I'm currently preparing a LDJ and was wondering how to best approach the ideation part (step 5) if you have multiple HMW's. Do you ideate solutions and vote per HMW individually or all at once? Or alternatively ideate solutions per HMW and vote on the total of solutions? In this workshop I expect more then one challenge. Anyone that can share their experience with this and what works best? Many thanks in advance for your help!

Hy, I have to do a workshop for small groups of 5 participants. The goals of the exercise is to emphasize that every one in the company is important. We can not function if one role is out. Does anyone has a good exercise? Duration of workshop = 30 min

A few years ago I decided to learn more about Design sprints by reading the Sprint book by Jake Knapp and watching some of the videos created by AJ&Smart. While doing this I made some notes. Last week I was looking back at my notes and realised they actually make quite a nice guide for anyone who wants to learn more about Design sprints or even run one themselves. The notes consist of my written notes as well as links to all the videos (in order) that I watched. I decided to publish my notes here for anyone who is interested. Let me know in the comments if you found this useful or if you think there is enough there for you to run your own Design sprint with them. You can of course contact me directly too if you have any questions 😀 https://kiranchauhan.substack.com/p/i-accidentally-created-a-how-to-guide

Hey all, loving this forum so far, great to have a network of people to reach out to and seek advice from. I have recently introduced Team Canvas sessions to our organisation and the response has been excellent. My experience to date(circa 30 sessions) is with groups of 10 or less participants. However, later this week I am facilitating for a team of 24 people and I am looking for advice on how I might handle this. I ensure that my sessions are very inclusive and that everyone gets a voice through each section of the canvas, but with a group of 24, how can i do this and ensure that everyone remains engaged? Love so tip on this

It can be tricky to maintain high levels of engagement but there are steps you can take to get great results. Here’s 4️⃣ tops tips for facilitating impactful virtual workshop: ✅Plan and write up your explanations for your exercises. Use the what, why, how formula to make sure everyone ‘gets’ your exercise ✅Build in more prep time - you’ll need to create a virtual board and think through your tech platforms. So make sure you’ve got enough time! ✅Ask more questions: it’s much more likely you’ll get crickets 🦗in virtual sessions so be prepared with some great questions to trigger discussions ✅Give your participants work e.g. get them clustering post its so there’s no chance of them getting distracted my Teams: Slack / Emails Let me know your tips below! What's worked for you? 😀

What is the LDJ Royale process about? How is it different from LDJ?

Hi guys, I have heard about clean language in one of the podcast episodes of Nathy Ravez where she had as a guest Charles-Louis de Maare, whom I know from the visualization training I did with him. I was curious to find out more so I read the book “From Contempt To Curiosity - Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling” by Caitlin Walker. I find this method very useful in different settings, either in getting all perspectives in a room where people need to be heard, or in coaching sessions, it is very versatile and has been used for many years in various areas. So I will share here my notes from it and next week I will share more about how you can use it for teams. What does clean language mean? Clean language is about asking questions without projecting the other person's answer. It is about accepting and extending what has been said. You know these situations where you would like to reappraise for example using repositioning reappraisal and you seem not to get the other person's perspective? There is a good situation where clean language can support well. The idea is to respect the other person's opinion even if it does not make sense to you and ask questions until you get their perspective. Clean language helps to do this in a fast way, using a few questions. What would a clean language conversation look like? There are several questions to be asked and the main idea is to relate to what the other persons just said in order to build the next question on it. Here is an example of which questions can be asked: Example of dialogues extracted from the book: “A: What would you like to have happened?” Guy: I would like to get more in touch with my feelings so that I can write better songs about them.

I'm working on an agenda for a nonprofit client's daylong session that's bringing together a group of 35 leaders in a particular subject matter area to talk about a very specific, niche aspect of that subject matter area. Some of the attendees have decades of experience with the niche area; others are brand-new to the concept. Success for this client is that by the conclusion of the meeting, we'll have gathered the group's substantive input on how and where stakeholders in this area should invest their time and resources to bring this niche work to larger scale -- and also that we will have generated increased interest and buy-in from the meeting attendees. Any thoughts on specific exercises/formats that will allow us to draw from the wisdom of both the experts AND novices in the room -- and allow everyone to both get and give to this process in meaningful ways -- without overcomplicating the session?