When designing activities and workshops, you’ll probably start by using templates and methods you are familiar with. Soon enough, you’ll need to expand your range and look for facilitation methods and tips for various situations, groups, and timeframes. So, where can you find them?

If you are looking for individual methods, for example an activity to start your session with, here is a list of the best online method libraries and collections of workshop activities. These are important resources, and good to bookmark, but it is also true that facilitation goes well beyond the ability to pick and lead a good game, energizer, or brainstorming activity.

A skilled facilitator knows how to put it all together in a coherent flow, design workshops that deliver results, and encourage people to bring their best possible contribution to group work by applying facilitation skills such as active listening.

If you want to develop a deeper understanding of how facilitation works and pick up some good methods along the way, luckily many organizations and groups around the world have taken the time to put together complete facilitation toolkits. In this article, we will provide links and details to 10 of the best toolkits to learn, and improve, your facilitation skills.

Continuous development is very important to facilitators. Keeping up to date with the latest trends is important in order to keep attracting clients and for your workshops to stay relevant. While the main principles of facilitation remain stable in time, new ideas and frameworks emerge all of the time.

Stay on top of the game, keep connected and inspired by getting into the habit of listening to facilitation podcasts and subscribing to popular newsletters.

In this article, we will cover different types of facilitation resources that can help you in your journey to becoming a skilled professional in this growing field.

Stay on Top of the Game with Facilitation Newsletters

You may find it hard to keep up to date with the latest trends and topics that are attracting interest within the world of facilitation and workshop design.

Luckily though, there are a handful of generous businesses, organizations individual consultants, and thought leaders in the field who neatly package information on what is current in newsletters delivered straight to your inbox.

Here are 4 facilitation newsletters we recommend. These are the ones we actually open, read, and discuss, but for sure there are many others: let us know in the comments what your favorite ones are!

Gwyn Wansbrough’s The Quest.

Delivered every Monday to most facilitators I know, Gwyn Wansbrough’s The Quest newsletter is a charming combination of personal insights and curated information.

Each edition begins with a question and offers pathways for readers to deepen their knowledge of a specific topic. Gwyn specializes in online workshops and you will find a lot of useful tips on making remote sessions engaging, but there are topics specific to in-person facilitation as well, and many subjects apply to both settings.

You can browse through all previous editions right here.

Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering

With her book The Art of Gathering – How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker did away with all the jargon and wove heartfelt, thoughtful connections between being a facilitator and being a host.

In her widely read newsletter, she keeps the connections flowing. The Art of Gathering is a reliable source of inspiration not only for business development and effective meetings, but for creating magic every time people assemble, be it a family meal or a formal reception.

Voltage Control’s Control the Room

Every week, Voltage Control‘s Douglas Ferguson packs a snappy, condensed write-up of whatever the industry has been discussing these days. Be it the return to the office, psychological safety, or the latest trends in design and innovation. The newsletter also lists upcoming events, courses, and a summary of the latest podcast episode.

Control the Room is great for staying current on what makes meetings great and for actionable ideas for planning innovation processes. It was also the most-listened-to facilitation podcast of 2022, based on answers given to the State of Facilitation survey.

SessionLab’s Newsletter

At SessionLab we put out a newsletter twice a month, bringing a curated selection of methods from our Library as well as featured templates, events, and links to more resources to feed your curiosity.

We’ve also prepared a bounty of extra material you can get delivered straight to your inbox, including two email courses and two facilitation manuals: SessionLab’s Complete Guide to Workshop Planning and the Essential Meeting Facilitation Toolkit.

The first email course, “Facilitation is for Everyone!” is a 5-week introduction to what facilitation is, covering the basics of group dynamics and tips on how to make your meetings better. It includes activities and worksheets to get you started.

If you facilitate already and would like to dig deeper, “Solving Facilitation Challenges” might be just the thing. It covers 4 key obstacles, and introduces pathways to becoming more resourceful facilitators: keeping up with the trends; collaborating with your team; transforming conflict; and managing time.

Listen to the Best Facilitation Podcasts

Do the job you love, they say, and you will never work a day be working all the time. If listening to facilitators talk shop, or getting inspired by the stories of creative innovators, is your idea of rest, you are in good company.

There is a growing number of podcasts dedicated to facilitation, effective meetings, group processes, and workshop design. Do you have some to recommend? Please add them in the comments!

First Time Facilitator

Leanne Hughes’ long-running First Time Facilitator podcast is a great place to begin with. In any one of its over 200 episodes, you’ll find inspiration and encouragement that are consistently beginner-friendly.

The podcast has a focus on training and learning, bringing a no-nonsense, can-do attitude to creating learning experiences that really work. The First Time Facilitator podcast is a reliable provider of sound advice and immediately applicable recommendations and tips.

Workshops Work

Myriam Hadnes has collected so many in-depth interviews in her essential podcast Workshops Work that she had to have a special map designed just to help listeners orient and choose!

Workshop Work has, rightly so, gained a faithful following among facilitators worldwide, with its deep, insightful interviews with experts of meeting design as well as with professionals drawing in their expertise from other fields, such as mediation, marketing, and the arts. You can also download scripts and one-page summaries of each conversation.

Creative Confidence

Listeners of IDEO U’s Creative Confidence podcast get to listen in on the creative process of innovators, designers and strategists from a variety of industries.

In each episode, IDEO U Founder Suzanne Gibbs Howard and Executive Design Director Coe Leta Stafford lead conversations that aim to identify each guest’s unique way of leading, being creative, innovating, and growing, and what lessons we can all learn from their stories.

Happiness Academy

The way we enter a room as facilitators does matter. Many experienced facilitators will highlight the importance of inner work and the type of posture and presence you bring into a room as you lead participants in a workshop. If you’d like to know more about this topic, Mirna Smidt’s Happiness Academy podcast may be just the thing.

In each episode, Mirna discusses an aspect of positive psychology, such as how to bring more focus, presence, and concentration to your work. This podcast is not targeted at facilitators especially, but as a trainer of trainers herself, Mirna has examples and applications that can be nuggets of gold for workshop professionals and trainers.

How Toolkits can Help you Learn Facilitation

Facilitation toolkits contain a set of facilitation methods, activities, and techniques in one, downloadable format. This comes in really handy when you need to access them offline. Additionally, the best toolkits are designed to accent their content and provide structure and categorization for better understanding and usage of the activities.

Need more reasons why they are a great resource?

The toolkits you will find in this post will help a skilled facilitator as well as a newcomer to the field. They all have an easily understandable format, regarding both the method descriptions and the whole documents, too and they are all free and downloadable, so you can use them whenever you want.

These toolkits contain several different techniques for various facilitation needs, so you won’t spend time needlessly searching methods one-by-one for each of your projects or meetings. Even better,  this list of toolkits we have collected can help you facilitate a whole session, all the way from opening to closing.

So without further ado, here are the toolkits!

Curated Collections of Facilitation Methods

In this opening section we’ve collected lists of activities and methods. Facilitators, generally speaking, will have a series of tools and practices they are familiar with, know to work well, and can always fall back upon. That said, it’s always nice to learn new practices, be it an innovative process for decision making or a simple ice breaker.

The following toolkits are curated collections of activities suitable for small groups as well as larger ones. Bookmark them as sources of ideas and inspiration for your next workshops!

Collective Action Toolkit

• Aim: Bring groups together to work on a challenge/solution
• Number of methods: 25
• Unique feature: “Where to next?” section

The Collective Action Toolkit from the Frog Design team was created to help bring groups together to accomplish a shared goal. These activities help problem-solving small and larger challenges concerning a whole community.

The 25 group facilitation techniques are sorted into 6 categories from “imagine more ideas” to “plan for action”. Next to the time frame and group size, you will find the needed materials for the exercise.

At the end of every activity, there is a “where to next?” section which suggests the next ideal step, whether it is an activity or a new section such as “define your problem”. One of the strengths of this collection is its design which complements each activity and also gives visual cues of how an exercise should be done.

Facilitation Tools for Meetings and Workshops

• Aim: Effective group facilitation
• Number of methods: 65
• Unique feature: “Things to be aware of” pointers for each method

This toolkit from Seeds for Change is one of the most thorough compilations of facilitation tools with 65 methods that are available for free. The collection covers most of the main facilitation areas, in an order that follows a typical meeting or workshop.

This includes ideas for warm-ups, increasing participation, prioritizing ideas, trust building, exploring complex issues, ending and evaluating sessions, as well as a generous sprinkling of games and energizers.

In every category, you will find several activities indicating ideal group size and time. Additionally, each practice is completed by a list of “things to be aware of”. These are the nuances, instructions, and inclusion practices a skilled facilitator ought to consider when offering a certain activity. If you are in need of a simple, easy-to-understand and well-structured toolkit, go ahead and take a look!

SessionLab’s Essential Meeting Facilitation Toolkit

• Aim: Effective meeting facilitation
• Number of methods: 12
• Unique feature: Find more about these and other methods in SessionLab’s Library.

Here at SessionLab we’ve created a powerful set of resources to share facilitation practices with the world. You can head over to our newsletter page to sign up to free email courses introducing general facilitation skills (Facilitation is for Everyone!) and tackling some of the most common pitfalls (Facilitation Challenges) to get tips, exercises and reading material delivered to your inbox.

We’ve collected a suite of 12 methods we consider essential to making meetings really work (and that we use ourselves) in the Essential Meeting Facilitation Tookit. Sometimes it can be hard to imagine how methods come together in a coherent flow, especially in a formal work setting such as a team meeting. This essential template puts some of the methods from the toolkit to use; we hope it can give you a sense of how much can be achieved, even in a small group, when facilitation methods are put to good use!

SALTO Youth Quality Handbook on Facilitation

• Aim: Train youth for peer education projects
• Number of Techniques: 15
• Unique features: Based on a real-life training

SALTO-YOUTH is a network of seven resource centers working on European priority areas within the youth field. As part of the European Commission’s Training Strategy, SALTO-YOUTH provides non-formal learning resources for youth workers and youth leaders and organizes training and contact-making activities to support organizations and National Agencies (NAs) within the frame of the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Youth program, the European Solidarity Corps, and beyond.

A number of the organization’s activities are focused on disseminating facilitation skills, especially in the context of youth programs, retreats, exchanges, and training courses.

If you are interested in a peer education approach to facilitation, and looking for activities that really work with younger participants, with a strong intercultural approach, this booklet is for you. Facilitation is Easy includes tips on basic facilitation skills such as co-facilitating and setting up a venue.

An especially interesting aspect of this publication is that it’s based on a real-life youth workshop. No abstractions here! All the activities are detailed as they were actually run, including pictures of the group at work and their posters. A great place to get a better sense of facilitation-based training in action!

For more ideas on introducing newcomers to facilitation you can also check out this template for a half-day beginners workshop.

Manuals to Help You Become a More Skilled Facilitator

The facilitation compilations we have presented so far put an emphasis on hands-on, immediately implementable facilitation techniques and activities, usually according to some kind of categorization. They are good for bringing variation to your existing “facilitator toolbox” of frequently used exercises.

However, sometimes you might need to go back and review the basics of facilitation principles, or you might just be getting familiar with this field. Whatever the case, the next toolkits will help you dive into the more abstract yet equally important part of facilitation: the basic principles and good-to-knows.

All facilitators pretty quickly realize that there is a lot more to guiding groups than just having a good set of activities.

Beyond having a magic box of tools, facilitators must develop an understanding of how groups work, what the possible underlying dynamics are, and what stages a discussion typically undergoes on its way to becoming a successful decision.

Facilitators must understand how to raise, and maintain, energy levels; how to include diverse voices; how to co-create safe space, and more. The following booklets can help you improve your facilitation skills in this direction, and better serve your participants and clients.

FFBS Facilitation Toolkit

• Aim: Understand the process of facilitation
• Number of Techniques: 5
• Unique feature: A walk-through of facilitation processes with handouts

This facilitation toolkit from Care.org is a practical starter toolkit covering all of the important areas a facilitator should know about before actively facilitating groups. FFBS stands for Farmers’ Field and Business Schools, which is an educational and empowerment program for women in agricultural activity in the global south.

As the context indicates, this material is a good starting point for those who are new to the facilitating world. Among the topics, you will find “adult learning”, “qualities of a good facilitator”, “how to moderate exercises” and “giving and receiving feedback”.

Although the focus is more on “how to facilitate” the toolkit also offers some basic facilitation exercises indicating materials and objectives next to the recommended time and group size. If you are only getting familiar with facilitation, or you need to refresh the basics, then make this collection your go-to resource.

NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement Facilitator’s Toolkit

• Aim: Increase interaction and participation at events and meetings
• Number of Techniques: 27
• Unique feature: Top tips about what not to do

The NHS’ Facilitator’s Toolkit is divided in two main sections, with a user-friendly design somewhat reminiscent of a map of metro stations (well, tube stations I guess, this being the UK). The first part contains 27 easy, friendly activities, divided into sections that follow the structure of a typical meeting or event, from getting-to-know-you to closing activities. Do note that these are very much geared to native speakers of English (i.e. some rely on rhyme and alliteration) so make sure you choose those most appropriate to the group you are working with.

While the first part of the booklet is useful in itself with many tried and tested facilitation resources, the final sections really shine. The team putting together this resource has found expert facilitators to provide their top tips: some are scattered along the methods, and others are collected in the second part. With headlines such as “Preparation and venue” and “Managing group dynamics,” these provide clear and practical guidance to anyone wanting to learn more about how facilitators work. The “What not to do!” list at the very end is an absolute gem. What top tips of things not to do would you add?

Transgender Europe’s (TGEU) Facilitator’s Toolkit

• Aim: Learn how to handle power, conflict and diversity
• Number of Techniques: 23
• Unique features: Available in Spanish, and in text-to-speech format.

This Facilitation Toolkit is written by Nim Ralph and Nadia Vogel and is based on their work as facilitators with the European Transgender Council. The Facilitation Toolkit takes a power-critical approach to facilitation.

Anyone gaining more experience as a group facilitator will soon encounter complex challenges related to how to appropriately handle power differences, such as between a manager and a new intern in the workplace, or between founders and newcomers in a volunteer association. This guide offers practical, no-nonsense support to facilitators in need of developing an extra bit of self awareness in the more challenging aspects of the role.

It includes brief guides on understanding power, dealing with conflict, understanding different kinds of learning styles and how to make space for these in your sessions, as well as considering access needs while facilitating or preparing sessions. As is fitting for a guide that explores accessibility with intent, it is available not only just in English but also in Spanish, and in a text-to-speech format (in English).

Resources for Leading Group Discussions

A large part of the facilitator’s job is to carefully lead groups through discussions. You may call this part of the task “moderation”, “directing traffic”, or have your own words for it. The fact is, it may be the most common application of facilitation skills even outside structured, carefully designed workshops.

There are many different ways to lead collective discussions. You’ll need to know how to kindly interrupt, how to pose questions that move the group ahead, as well as how to reformulate, summarize, hold, and reconcile differences.

If you are looking for a tool to help you with this particular part of a meeting or event, here are three interesting sources of knowledge created by organizations working at the intersection of education and policy.

University of Edinburgh’s Facilitator’s Toolkit

• Aim: Integrate reflective practices in higher education
• Number of Techniques: 5 (find them in the Reflection Toolkit section)
• Unique features: Case studies from classroom practice

As we’ve recounted in this article on teachers as facilitators, good classroom practices such as having small group teamwork or well-led discussions have a lot in common with facilitation. In this web-based toolkit, the University of Edinburgh has put together a complete overview of how to employ group discussions and reflective practices in higher education.

Facilitating political discussions booklet

• Aim: Training to work through charged political conversations
• Number of Techniques: 13
• Unique features: Handouts to encourage self-awareness

This packet of workshop materials was put together by Nancy Thomas and Mark Birmhall-Vargas on behalf of the Institute of Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University. Addressing the risk that teachers and university staff might shy away from charged political discourse, they have provided a guideline that may prove uniquely useful to any facilitator looking for facilitation resources directed specifically to having those difficult conversations around political ideology, social identity and power.

This booklet contains great advice on how to set ground rules and navigate the tensions of discussions where there is no clear “wrong” or “right” and participants may feel attacked in their personal beliefs. It includes plenty of tips and handouts to help self-reflection and growth. The advice contained in this guidebook will work with larger groups as well.

Do note that some of the specific exercises included are quite US-centric and some may be dated or not applicable to your group, so you might need to change some handouts and base discussions on topics more relevant to your specific situation.

Talking Climate Workshop guide

• Aim: Learning to host open conversations on a sensitive topic
• Number of Techniques: 7
• Unique features: Focussed on climate change

Last but not least comes a guidebook to facilitating conversations around a very specific topic: talking about climate change. These resources provide practical evidence-based guidance on how you can help friends, family, colleagues, neighbors and any person in your community feel more confident about talking about climate change in their daily lives.

This workshop is based on what the organization Climate Outreach calls REAL TALK:

Respect your conversational partner and find common ground
Enjoy the conversation
Ask questions
Listen, and show you’ve heard

Tell your story
Action makes it easier (but doesn’t fix it)
Learn from the conversation
Keep going and keep connected

The guidebook is short and to the point, and comes with a full workshop script and slide deck you can use or pick up for inspiration; if you want more resources on climate conversations, the same website provides plenty of documentation to study.

In closing

Whether you are a seasoned facilitator with several years of experience behind you or an enthusiastic newbie who has just gotten a taste for this profession, we hope that these facilitation resources will be of value to you and become part of the next steps in your facilitation journey.

Which are your favorites among these toolkits? Do you know of more resources? Please share with us in the comments, or join the discussion in our free, friendly community space; we would love your input and feedback!

As a trainer, educator or facilitator, you have probably experienced that good icebreakers, exercises, and energizer games are essential for an engaging and effective soft skills training.

Soft skills training programs may include different topics, such as effective communication, time management, emotional intelligence, presentation skills, active listening and more. They may be short or part of a more comprehensive program. Certainly, being directed to adult learners, they must include hands-on practice and engaging activities for skill development.

It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for your session, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, profile of participants, and the time available.

We are here to help! Below you will find the best free online soft skills resources for trainers, education professionals, and facilitators.

The Best Free Platforms with Soft Skills Training Materials

Refreshing your toolbox of trainer resources is good for experimenting with new ideas and, importantly, in order to avoid falling back upon a popular activity that some of the participants have already done before.

However, finding proven quality exercises on soft skills online is not easy. There are many resources online that are not cheap, and yet their quality is questionable. Even with trusted resources there can still be a lack of essential information that can help you ensure your planned training activities are conducted properly.

Occasionally, you can find some information on professional forums, but usually not in a structured and easily searchable way. Here are 5 great places to go to find libraries of accessible, well-organized methods and tools for teaching soft skills.

BusinessBalls

BusinessBalls.com is one of the most comprehensive collections of free soft skills training materials online. You can find video clips for teaching and training, team-building games, and theories on different topics including time management, strategy and innovation, career success, leadership, and even relationships.

Moreover, the team behind BusinessBalls offers advice on how to enhance your use of the site and the materials and provides an option for asking for new content. They focus on resources and topics that help trainers, L&D professionals, and educators to gain knowledge and inspiration from.

With 230 available courses, there is something for everyone. All the topics are easy to search through and while some require premium membership, you can find plenty of free content as well. All the courses include different articles, videos, and a strong set of extra materials: you can create your own learning path, immersing yourself in topics from organization management to self awareness and many more.

TrainerBubble

As the name indicates, this site offers a great variety of different training games and resources. Icebreakers, training documents, and team building exercises are just a few of the topics you can find on Trainer Bubble along with training videos. Every exercise’s description states the objective, duration, and group size. Additionally, there is an “intended for…” section that gives you a brief overview of how to maximize your use of the activity.

Complete training course materials are available for purchase, but the free training materials section includes what is essentially a starting kit to help you train participants in soft skills. Aside from the games and exercises, there are articles on different topics such as how to lead a brainstorming session or how to do networking, evaluation sheets, and an overview of popular training models.

Training Course Material

This company specializes in selling training packages for the workplace. If what you are looking for is free soft skills training materials though, you can still find support for your creative process in the free material section.

Particularly interesting are the free assessment tools: they give the reader the possibility to self-test on such areas as learning styles and conflict resolution skills. Tests and quizzes are popular with learners, and can make a good addition to a successful soft skills training course.

Every test ends with notes and articles that can be a great place to learn more about soft skills and related topics. Different results from different learners can also form the basis of debrief conversations.

Best Collection of Games and Exercises to Teach Soft Skills

In this section we’ve assembled some of the best places to go if you are looking for individual games, activities and exercises to add some flare to your soft skills training experience. You can find still more in our collection of free online workshop resources.

Thiagi’s Game List

Thiagi’s game list has more than 400 free games and exercises with detailed descriptions, facilitation tips, and debriefing questions, ready-to-run for everyone. What makes these games so powerful is the debriefing section of every exercise. Content is important but success comes only if you can debrief in a way that participants can learn from.

Aside from the games, you can find articles, interviews and podcasts on their site. A significant set of Thiagi games are also available in the SessionLab library, where you can easily filter and search based on ideal group size, time frame and necessary materials.

Hyper Island Toolbox

The Hyper Island Toolbox contains 100+ games and exercises sorted into categories such as energisers, self-leadership or innovation. The latter category is what gives this toolbox an edge: if you are looking for activities for a design-focused workshop or prototyping session, you can easily find it here. Every activity indicates group size, time frame, facilitation level and comfort zone from the participant’s point of view. The instructions are well-written and easy to follow. All of the exercises are available in the SessionLab library as well.

Icebreakers.ws

Icebreakers.ws contains a collection of more than 100 icebreakers sorted by group size and icebreaker type. As the name indicates, it focuses solely on icebreakers, but it does have a great variety of them on the website.

Icebreakers get a bad reputation sometimes. Nobody likes “forced fun”! When picking and presenting an icebreaking, getting-to-know-you or energizing activity, there are three things to keep in mind to ensure they help, not hinder, your learning experience:

• choose an activity that connects to the workshop’s topic. There are plenty of games and quick energizers related, for example, to leadership, good communication or teamwork. Explain the purpose behind the activity and save some time, even a quick 5-min, to debrief learnings.
• learn about your group before choosing activities. What are they comfortable with? What mood suits their style?
• enable people to opt out! Every activity in a course should be an invitation. Give participants options, for example, to step aside and observe the dynamics if they don’t feel like joining a particular icebreaker or game.

Skills Converged Free Training Materials

If you are lost among Skills Converged’s over 500 articles, tips and tools for soft skills training, go check out the guidance in their Introduction Page. You’ll find selected topics and categories to begin with, from how to design a training course to curated collections on motivation, communication, and more.

SessionLab’s Library of Facilitation Techniques

In our own SessionLab library you can find hundreds of methods and activities to support your delivery of soft skills training. This is a crowdsourced collection of over 1200 methods.

You’ll find classics from well-known frameworks such as Liberating Structures, as well as methods tested and added by facilitators across the globe. When using SessionLab’s planner, you can add methods from the library directly into your agenda, making the flow of designing skills training much more effective.

If you have created activities yourself and want to help others succeed, consider adding a new resource as well!

Soft Skills Training Materials on Interpersonal Skills and Emotional Intelligence

The definition of what exactly is a “soft skill” changes depending on who you speak with. It is generally implied to include abilities related to communication and working with other people. This overlaps with facilitation skills, particularly those falling under the broad category of life competences.

Burnout, miscommunication, and workplace conflicts can impact employee happiness, even affecting turnover. Consequently, there is a big market for courses that can help teams improve their people skills in workplace environments.

Session Templates for Interpersonal Skills Training

This half-day agenda for a self-awareness workshop (based on Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why it Matters more than IQ) provides a real-world example of what a training session focused on improving soft skills with managers and co-workers looks like.

People in leadership positions need soft skill training boosts more than anyone. It can be taxing to manage people and figure out the intricacies of conflict resolution or workplace communication! If you are looking for the right sort of activities to upskill leaders’ soft skill abilities on the job, take a look at the flow of this two-day agenda template for a Leadership Development workshop.

More Resources on Emotional Intelligence

If you are interested in how, as trainer, you can help teams develop emotional intelligence, we’ve written an introductory guide to the topic, which lists 25 activities you can facilitate to help build communication skills, empathy, and emotional self-management.

This article on the Positive Psychology page lists still more resources you can dig into if you want to focus on developing emotional intelligence skills.

Soft Skills Training Programs Materials on Feedback

Another vast field of soft skill training covers effective communication and feedback. In fact, learning how to deliver, and receive feedback is possibly the most requested of new skills. Trainers are regularly asked to upskill any new co worker on this topic. The ability to design and deliver an excellent soft skill training with a focus on feedback is bound to bring success!

• a collection of 14 great activities for practicing feedback techniques in order to communicate effectively with your co-workers;
• an in-depth look at what you need to prepare to run a feedback workshop, including information on pre-work to do with your potential client;
• a template for a 2-hour workshop designed to introduce new managers to giving and receiving better feedback with their team.

Further useful trainer resources

Forums and groups can be a great help for finding a specific exercise or theory, gaining some inspiration on delivery or getting feedback on your own ideas. Plus, in this section we are happy to share some more resources which were recommended by our SessionLab community!

Some LinkedIn groups for trainers are:

• Effective and Fun Training Techniques (83k members)
• Training&Development (37k members)
• Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group (185k members)

Further websites recommended by the SessionLab community:

• More than two hundred free articles and resources to develop people and organizations on Nick Heap’s site. Among them you can find some exercises and games as well.
• Skillsconverged.com offers a range of free training resources: 10 training exercises among many other useful templates

If you are interested in solutions that help you in managing your sessions, we have collected no less than 47 of the best free tools for effectively preparing and running training sessions.

Do you have any further suggestions for where to find quality training resources? Share them with us in the comments, or join the conversation in SessionLab’s friendly facilitation community!

Nowadays, it is even tougher when our capacity for attention is lower than a goldfish’s.

The digital noise around us is so high only the extremities get through. Most of us have gotten used to this “new normal”, and we expect so much more from an article, a movie or a brand to get our attention. Likewise, we expect no less from our trainers.

The burden of engaging participants during a training event always falls hard on the trainer. It’s not the participants’ responsibility to get engaged immediately, it is the trainer who needs to persuade the audience.

Of course, it is always easier if you know that the people listening to you made the choice to participate, and it’s much harder if none of the participants really wanted to take part in a training required by HR or a superior.

No matter what the case, follow our tips on engagement and training will become easier.

Different people – different learning styles

To engage the room you have to keep in mind that people learn in different ways. Some are visual learners who prefer pictures and diagrams; others are physical learners who like to use their body and sense of touch to understand problems.

When putting together the agenda for the training, make sure to incorporate both group exercises and individual ones. Put in varying activities where participants need to watch a video or read a story, move around the room or discuss a task.

Create an environment where all the different learners are welcomed and engaged.

Relevance

We can’t expect participants to pay attention to a session that doesn’t connect with them.

They want to learn about a concept or problem that resonates with them and can potentially make their situation, behaviour or current situation better.

The key to delivering relevant content is by asking some questions first!

Do some preliminary research on your participants, or send them a survey before the training to tailor content according to their needs. However, sometimes you don’t get the luxury of getting to know your audience beforehand. In these situations don’t get discouraged!

Call a contact person who might know the participants and ask some questions that would help you design the session.  Schedule a quick phone interview with 2-3 participants.

If all else fails you can still ask participants questions right at the beginning of the training. What do you hope to get out of this training? What do you expect in these 3 hours? What are your expectations for the day? The answers will give you some direction.

Make it a dialogue

Isn’t it hard to pay attention to someone for 45, 90 or 120 minutes continuously? Especially considering the average human attention span these days is said to be around 8 seconds. Although the above-mentioned situation might happen more often during university lectures or big conferences, there is always room to improve in training situations as well.

To avoid long talks or explanations during a session (and thus keeping the attention alive) formulate theories, concepts or bigger topics into a conversation. There are several reasons to do so.

First, the session will be more enjoyable for everyone.

Second, you can leverage the group knowledge on topics you wanted to present and check if something is no longer interesting or needs to be clarified.

Third, having a dialogue allows participants to express their opinions, which could lead to hearing several different opinions, making the session more inclusive and diverse.

A simple way of start a discussion is to keep the answers to yourself, meaning when a participants ask something instead of answer it yourself, involve the whole group of giving an answer.

Tell a story

Stories are powerful. We connect to each other through stories. We buy certain things because the stories they tell are appealing to us, and we pay for movies, theatre tickets, and books to read. Our own realities are created by our narratives, the stories we tell ourselves each day.

So why don’t we use stories in the training environment? It has been proven that hearing a story releases chemicals in our brains making us more focused, relaxed and creative. Plus people better remember facts presented in story form than in a diagram or chart.

For instance ask participants to share a story of a challenge they’ve overcome to enhance group cohesion.

If you are crafting public speaking or leadership sessions, introduce the concept of public narrative.

It is a powerful framework for telling stories that inspire action. It consists 3 stages: the story of self where you share the values that are calling you to act. The story of us where you communicates the values that are shared by those you want to motivate to act. Finally the story of now share the challenge that demand action right now.

Whether you are delivering your session within this framework or encourage your participants to create their own stories following these steps it will result in high engagement.

Plus, try to use metaphors, case studies, real-life examples or your own stories to engage your participants!

Gamify

Games are providing a natural learning setting. They are involving, interactive, improving competencies and building skills. That’s why they are fun and engaging.

When you feel like energy and engagement goes down and participants start to stare out of the window or at their phones, introduce a game. It makes people move, compete, think, and usually brings laughter and fun into the session.

A more advanced version of incorporating games into trainings would be to explain or shed light on a topic through a game. Would you like to introduce participants to strategy thinking? Or emphasize the importance of active listening? Have them learn to give effective feedback? If you don’t know where to find games for these topics, don’t worry! SessionLab has a free, open source workshop library with more than 400 training games and activities.

Do you have more tips on how to engage participants during training events? Or have you already tried one from the library? Tell us in the comments; we are genuinely curious.

Stay tuned for more posts for facilitation and training inspiration, tips and tricks from the makers of Sessionlab! If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe to our blog! And if you have an opinion on any of the subjects, share it with us in the comments. We would love to hear from you!

Or that the feedback was actually more like a conversation than your superior just listing all the things you’ve done wrong? Even when feedback is mostly constructive and positive it can be stressful getting it.

…or you dread it? You are not alone.

For instance, in large companies 62% of employees say that they don’t ever see changes occur from feedback they give during reviews. That’s why big companies have been eliminating reports and performance reviews.

Some of this feedback frustration could come from a lack of transparency or consistency, subjectivism and the absence of actionable steps after feedback, and misused or inadequate forms and methods such as the infamous “feedback sandwich”, often referred to as the sh*t sandwich, where you get one positive, one negative and then one positive feedback at the end.

The problem with this technique it that you either don’t take the negative feedback seriously, or you don’t believe the positive ones (thinking they just there to make you feel a bit better for getting the negative ones).

But before you completely abandon feedback, when done right, it is still one of the most powerful tools for, and influences on, learning and performance.

It can provide the opportunity for people, teams, and companies to modify behaviours, go in new directions, reinforce good practices, increase motivation and get recognition.

It also enhances psychological safety which is the most crucial element to have in team settings according to a research by Google.

Interestingly, according to a survey from the Harvard Business Review about performance feedback, people want to hear negative more than positive feedback.

When asked about their preferences for receiving feedback from managers, two thirds of the respondents said that they are more open to corrective feedback as it helps them grow and improve. (However, it’s important to note that humans are wired to choose the answers that are considered “desirable” in any situation even when responding anonymously.)

Below we highlight 3 constructive feedback methods you can try instead of the feedback sandwich. These methods will help you concentrate on specific situations/behaviours, helping you boost your authenticity and avoid generic statements.

Let’s not give up on feedback just yet; let’s fix it!

Smarter tools = smarter meetings

The Situation – Behavior – Impact Feedback Tool

SBI is an acronym for Situation, Behaviour and Impact. This tool helps focus your comments on specific and defined behaviours and situations and how these have affected others in your environment. Given the objectivity of SBI it is highly likely that the recipient would receive it in a nondefensive manner.

Situation – Start with a situation. Define the exact situation you want to discuss: “Today at the stakeholder meeting you were talking with John…” .

Behaviour – Identify the behaviour you want to talk about. “And you were questioning him on the numbers of our last report..”. The key and challenge here is to not make assumptions or judgements. Don’t listen to gossip or others’ opinions on the matter as these could undermine your feedback.

Impact – Explain the impact another’s behaviour had on you or the environment. “I noticed that all the members who were present at the meeting were listening to you and John arguing about the numbers. I felt embarrassed by this, and I fear that it might affect our team’s reputation in the stakeholders’ eyes.” (As a general rule, always use I-statements when giving feedback to someone.)

Let the other person absorb the information, reflect on it and find actionable steps to improve the behaviour that caused problems.

CEDAR Feedback Model

Another great framework to use when giving feedback is the CEDAR model. What makes the model unique is that it encourages the individual to take the lead in discussing his/her performance rather than just getting “orders from above”. This model is credited to Anna Wildman.

Context – Set up the environment for feedback. Check if the person you are talking with also understands the importance of feedback and sees its place in, and impact on, the work they do.

Examples – Encourage the individual to identify specific examples of when and where things went wrong or not according to plan. Explore the situation(s) and behaviour together.

Diagnosis – This part is about finding out why the person acted the way they did and what could have lead to the mentioned behaviours. Try not to put words in the other person’s mouth or let your assumptions affect their answers. Ask open-ended questions to help identify the root causes of the behaviour.

Action – When deciding on actionable steps to avoid a certain behaviour, let the ideas come from the person who is receiving the feedback. It generates bigger commitment and motivation toward carrying out these actions.

Review – The final step is to check if the person understood both the feedback and the suggested actions.

The IDEA Model

IDEA is yet another acronym standing for Identify, Describe, Encourage and Action. It has the same essential bricks of delivering effective and constructive feedback as the aforementioned models.

Identify – A specific behaviour that you want changed. We cannot stress enough how important it is to be as precise as possible.

Describe – How the behaviour patterns affected either the environment or the outcome of a situation. Emphasise here how a change or correction of the behaviour would have a positive impact.

Encourage – The change. It is vital for the individual to know that you are standing beside him/her instead of judging. It can boost motivation, trust and commitment and cohesion.

Action – Make sure no one leaves the room without knowing what their next steps are. Again, aim for specific, measurable steps so the next time you meet with the person you can decide on objective indicators for evaluating feedback implementation.

The Essentials

Reading these constructive feedback techniques, some similarities may have caught your attention. The core structure of each of them is naming a specific situation or behaviour, explaining the impact or aftermath of that certain situation and then looking ahead, and discussing actions to avoid or reinforce the behaviours or situations.

This is because the majority of feedback lacks precision, objectivism and system-thinking, and fails to take into consideration the direct environment, dealing mainly with the past instead of looking to the future to make sure bad patterns in behaviour are improved or changed.

Feedback plays a big role in organizations and teams as a primary source of evaluation and performance assessment. When hard work is rewarded and recognized, it helps managers recognize employees and create a welcoming work environment.

That’s why it is crucial to give feedback that is precise, easily understandable, and implementable by anyone who receives it. Implement these models at meetings and one-on-one conversations and you will provide effective feedback, every time.

Have you encountered feedback models you would recommend to the SessionLab community? Which of the presented models would you use? Tell us in the comments!

Stay tuned for more posts for facilitation and training inspiration, tips and tricks from the makers of Sessionlab! If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe to our blog! And if you have an opinion on any of the subjects, share it with us in the comments. We would love to hear from you!

These are just some of the questions Google’s researches asked when they embarked upon a journey to find out how to build the perfect team in early 2012.

After years of research, it turned out that it doesn’t matter if team members are friends or strangers, or if they have a strong hierarchical system or not.The only thing that separated thriving and successful teams from average ones was psychological safety.

Until early 2016 no one except researchers knew about psychological safety. Then in February, The New York Times published a piece on the aforementioned Google research called “Project Aristotle” and booom! Psychological safety immediately became the “it” concept among human resource experts and organizational psychologists.

No wonder though… Research showed that high psychological safety fosters organizational learning, innovation and innovative behaviour, creativity and risk-taking, just the types of behaviour that lead to novel ideas, proactivity, and thriving teams and organizations.

So, what is psychological safety anyway?

Amy Edmondson, who was among the first to research the concept, defined psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. This belief, however, tends to be tacit – something that is taken for granted.

When psychological safety is high in a team, everyday work and behaviors lead to seeking feedback, reporting mistakes, and frequently proposing new ideas with the understanding that if someone puts himself on the line, other’s will respond positively.

In contrast, if psychological safety is low in a team, members avoid engaging in the above-mentioned behaviours since they would not know how others would react. Ultimately, we all try hard to avoid being criticized, embarrassed or hurt.

Keeping in mind all the benefits of psychological safety, the important question becomes how to elicit psychological safety in teams.

Several techniques have emerged from studies; however, this being a fairly new concept to both psychologists and researchers, more studies and empirical testing are needed to determine the best approaches.

Here we list some of the most frequently mentioned factors that boost psychological safety in the workplace.

Choose the right leaders

Leaders have a great impact on the culture of the organization. They are often viewed as role models by their co-workers and teams, thus they have a direct influence on what actions are considered appropriate and are expected from members.

This means leaders, especially team leaders and middle managers, play a big role in creating psychological safety in teams. While observing teams, Amy Edmondson identified 3 behaviours that foster psychological safety:

• • Being approachable. If leaders make themselves available for discussions, open their offices to team members, and engage in formal and informal conversations, they actively reduce in-group barriers that might prohibit open communication.
  • Being open to input. In the same manner, when leaders ask for team members’ input, it greatly enhances psychological safety. Giving and receiving feedback on a regular basis shows team members that their opinions are valuable and respected.
  • Modeling fallibility. Leaders form the work culture and serve as models of acceptable behaviour for team members. If mistakes are swept under the rug or worse, punished, the team is likely to mimic the same behaviour. However, if leaders are open and honest about making mistakes and discuss them with the team, other team members will not be afraid to admit their own mistakes, thus creating a safe, trusting and open atmosphere.

Create trusting interpersonal relationships

If you were to make a big mistake, would you rather admit it to a team that trusts and respects you or to a team that questions your capabilities? Those teams that maintain a supportive, trusting atmosphere where members are respected report a higher feeling of psychological safety.

Want to go even further? Try using some of our great team building activities to create even deeper interpersonal relationships!

Make sure to speak the same amount

This may sound obvious, but more often than not people tend to stay in the background and keep silent, even when they do not agree with decisions and especially when a leader is imposing or forceful from the start.

However, ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard and every opinion is taken into consideration enhances the feeling of psychological safety as illustrated by Google’s research of the perfect team. Even if this means meetings last a little longer, it’s worth the time.

Empathize

Being able to empathize with others around us is a great ability and a key component of human behaviour. But when conflicts arise, we tend to concentrate only on ourselves, our points, and our own arguments. We need to feel safe.

But to have a constructive discussion,our partner, or the other team, needs to feel psychologically safe too. The next time when arguing over something use empathy to stop and think through the similarities between you and your partner. What would be considered a win-win situation for both of you?

+1 Measure

Implementing these methods and tips and creating a culture that enables psychological safety in a team or organization, is essential for high performance, innovation and creativity. Making a habit of measuring psychological safety is just as important.

Do you feel you are part of a team with high-level psychological safety? If so, what are the factors that contribute to that feeling? If not, what could you do to foster it?

Stay tuned for more posts for facilitation and training inspiration, tips and tricks from the makers of Sessionlab! If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe to our blog! And if you have an opinion on any of the subjects, share it with us in the comments. We would love to hear from you!

In this post we explore further the formation of teams with a focus on team building – a popular, though sometimes controversial, method that is usually a go-to for every organization when it comes to dealing with teams.

Team building.

What pictures come to mind seeing this word?

A 3-day long spa treatment with occasional games? Small rooms with no air and hours-long discussions on unimportant topics? Know-it-all trainers, bored participants, mandatory activities and that familiar feeling of relief at the end of such events?

Another frequent problem is that the content of team building is more often geared toward letting off some steam instead of focusing on the development of the team and preventing problems that commonly occur during a team’s life cycle.

Team building doesn’t have to be like this! When done right, it can boost team performance, help team members master skills, and foster an atmosphere of trust and encouragement.

Unfortunately, this is rarely what happens because most organizations look at team building as an event when it should be looked at as a continual process that doesn’t stop once a meeting or workshop is over.

Here, we have listed 5 essential topics with practical methods to use during your team building sessions.

1. Goal-setting
2. Role-clarification
3. Open Communication
4. Conflict Management
5. Trust

Goal-setting

Teams are formed to achieve specific goals which requires teamwork, collaboration and a complex set of several competencies. Importantly, teams can only form if goals are clear and measurable.

Without a mutually shared goal we can’t speak about teams.

Thus one of the key reasons for team building efforts is to help identify and set the purpose of the team.

When the focus of team building is to clarify goals and roles, you should be aware of some of the pitfalls that can occur: Ensure that team members are involved in the goal-setting process.

Studies have shown that when team members are encouraged to take part in setting and measuring goals, higher levels of commitment and motivation are seen, and team members have a mutual understanding that these goals are best achieved through collaboration.

Be careful to avoid setting too many goals, and don’t forget to prioritize them. Moreover, it is better if the goals only indicate a direction and that the team has the freedom to choose the means by which they reach their destination.

A practical tool for goal-setting: S.M.A.R.T goals

SMART is an acronym standing for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound. Defining goals by these criteria helps the team focus efforts, stay motivated, meet deadlines, have control and prioritize tasks.

Role clarification

To build an effective and high-performing team, members need to see how they can contribute their knowledge and competencies to the team’s goals.

Therefore, as a next step, make sure to dedicate some time to assigning people to goals, and discuss the different roles team members are going to take up to make the team successful. Having clear roles promotes individual accountability and fosters ownership of one’s work and the team’s goals.

Further, members should hold each other mutually accountable for their assignments and performance. Encouraging the team to perform regular check-ups on performance can drastically increase the standards of performance and deliverance of tasks.

A practical tool for role clarification and accountability: RACI matrix

RACI Matrix #gamestorming #project management #action 

Sometimes responsibilities aren’t clear. By creating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix, a group will tackle the responsibility problem directly.

RACI is again an acronym that stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. It helps identify different roles within the team in accordance with the goals and tasks needing to be done. By creating a visual matrix members can easily check who is in charge of what and ask the right person for support.

Open communication

Open and honest communication plays a critical role in a team’s life. We can argue that if a team is able to communicate clearly and openly they have already done half of the job.

Team leaders or facilitators play a big role in educating the team on this matter. In the early phase of team development it is especially helpful if leaders or facilitators initiate exercises targeting communication so the team can practice expressing ideas and opinions, giving feedback and understanding each other.

Learning to communicate nonviolently could be a great activity for all in the team. The exercise and the concept behind it emphasises the act of using “I-statements” to make observations, requests or express feelings and needs.

A specific kind of communication is giving feedback. Mastering the art of constructive feedback is essential throughout a team’s life cycle. It is best if some rules of giving and receiving feedback are set during team building or early on in the team formation cycle.

For instance, giving feedback only when it is asked for or necessary instead of giving it when unsolicited. For example, use “My suggestion to you would be to check the facts again on Greg’s report” instead of “These facts are wrong, why can’t you just do your job properly?! Go and check them again!”

A practical tool for giving feedback: Start, Stop, Continue

Start, Stop, Continue #gamestorming #action #feedback #decision making 

The object of Start, Stop, Continue is to examine aspects of a situation or develop next steps. Additionally, it can be a great framework for feedback

Start, Stop, Continue is a framework for giving feedback in forms of starting, stopping or continuing doing a certain activity or behavior. It’s easy to learn and instantly gives members actionable steps.

Conflict management

There comes a time for every team (hopefully!) when conflicts arise and different perspectives clash with each other. Although conflicts are usually viewed negatively, they are a vital part of the team development process.

In his book “Teambuilding”, Dyer argues that most conflict originates from unmet or misunderstood expectations from members of the team.

Normally, every person has an idea about what should be done, who should do it, and how it should be done. However these set of assumptions are implicit, thus easily violated by processes, tasks and people.

When negative feelings start to arise, teams should be able to openly discuss and deal with them.

Conflicts represent a divergence of ideas, opinions, or judgements on a given topic. During team formation, they often appear in 2 aspects: the realisation of the difference between the current reality vs. the expected goal of the team and the roles each team member would play in the team.

Conflicts are normal, and what has to be properly managed are the destructive side effects that fester from unexpressed negative feelings surrounding a conflict.

When looking to raise team awareness of constructive conflict management, the Thomas-Kilmann model is a great starting point. The goal here is that nobody feels threatened by conflict and that conflict is viewed as a normal aspect of teamwork.

A practical tool for conflict management: Conflict Responses

Conflict Responses #hyperisland #team #issue resolution 

A workshop for a team to reflect on past conflicts, and use them to generate guidelines for effective conflict handling. The workshop uses the Thomas-Killman model of conflict responses to frame a reflective discussion. Use it to open up a discussion around conflict with a team.

Here you will find the exercise based on the aforementioned Thomas-Kilmann model. It helps members identify conflicts that they handled well in the past and build upon these experiences in order to set effective resolution techniques for future conflicts.

Trust

The bad news is, no matter how well you apply any or all of the methods mentioned above, if by the end of the team building process the members do not trust each other (and do not model trustworthiness) you will have already failed.

The primary aim of team building is to create an atmosphere of trust and encouragement where members are encouraged to improve their skills and competencies and feel safe enough to admit their mistakes.

If goal setting, communication and conflict management are parts of the vehicle, then trust is the fuel. Trust enhances collaboration, creativity, member well-being, and ultimately performance.

To assess the current level of trust in a team you can use some of these questions by Dyer:

1. What is the current level of trust in the team?
2. What specific steps should be taken to increase trustworthiness?
3. What should be the process for regaining trust in the team and team members?

And remember: Team members don’t have to like each other or be friends to work together, but they need to trust each other under any circumstances.

A practical tool to enhance trust in the team: Who and Why?

Who and Why? #thiagi #action #trust 

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.

Who and Why identifies several behaviors, experiences, and characteristics that contribute to being trustworthy. By listing and discussing these factors the team can determine rules and actions to increase the level of trustworthiness between themselves.

Are you ready to have meaningful and effective team building sessions? Then the next time you design an agenda, make sure to have exercises and team building activities that help participants with goal-setting, role-clarification, open communication, conflict management and trust! By the end of the session, you will have a team that can take on any challenge.

What are your favorite topics to include in team building? What kind of activities do you usually use? Share with us!

Stay tuned for more on posts from facilitation to training inspiration, tips and tricks from the makers of Sessionlab! If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe to our blog! Share your experiences or opinions on our subject matter in the comments section. We would love to hear from you!

However, in our busy world it becomes harder and harder to squeeze in time to sit down, open a book and read. Normally, when faced with a problem or stuck with a question, we need an instant solution or inspiration.

That’s where TED talks can help us.

These inspiring, engaging and motivating speeches come in an easily digestible video format. They are perfect for when you are on the go or don’t have time to dive into a book. The talks are quilted with real life examples from experts, speakers and practitioners in different team building fields.

Here we have collected 5 brilliant TED talks on team building, teamwork and collaboration to inspire you, surprise you and help you master these topics!

Save time on your next team meeting or workshop

Howard Rheingold – The new power of collaboration

By showing how cooperation evolved through “social dilemmas”  such as the prisoner’s dilemma or the tragedy of the commons, Howard Rheingold makes a brilliant case for trust, collective action and the power of collaboration.

Rocío Lorenzo – How diversity makes teams more innovative

Does diversity in working teams contribute to a more innovative company? Based on a recent study of more than 1,600 corporate teams, heterogeneous teams come up with more creative and unique ideas; thus the answer is a clear and strong yes!

Tom Wujec – Build a tower, build a team

Taking on the marshmallow challenge, a popular team building exercise, Tom Wujec asks the question, “What can CEOs and business people learn from kindergarten children when looking at how facilitation plays a role in making teams better?”

Simon Sinek – Why good leaders make you feel safe

In his talk, Simon Sinek emphasizes the value of trust, cooperation and the “feeling of safety” within organizations. He discusses how these concepts can contribute to better teams and stronger and more resistant organizations.

Karen Grosz – Innovative Team building

Karen Grosz talks about the transformative power of creating together and how just some brushes, paints and an empty canvas can turn strangers into teams.

Did you find these talks helpful and inspirational? Is there anything you think is missing from this list? Or are you ready to check out some fun team building activities you can use alongside this wisdom? Tell us in the comments!

Business meetings are supposedly strict, short, and structured. Most of the cases participants are there not because they chose to do so, but was advised to attend or had to. They are normally less engaged or eager to take part in activities, that would be typical for a workshop, feeling like they are wasting their precious time on “games”.

If at this point you are asking how could you achieve an effective meeting with high engagement, measurable outcomes and a bit of fun, here is your answer: with gamestorming methods. Gamestorming refers to a set of practices and exercises to facilitate meetings in the business world. The name itself comes from games and brainstorming. These innovative activities aim to make meetings a great experience for participants, while still delivering on effectiveness, short timeframe and action.

Moreover the activities are aiming to ease and support processes and solve problems that could be more frequent in a business environment such as large group decision-making or defining the next steps of a project. The set of gamestorming activities vary from problem-solving, to idea generation, project planning, decision-making and teambuilding.

For instance Help me Understand could be a great exercise to solve misunderstandings or unanswered question regarding an organization change or a project. It brings management and employees to the same table and allowing them to have a discussion in a structured way.

Help Me Understand #gamestorming #problem solving #issue analysis 

Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players’ questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something they may not have known prior to the meeting.

Project management is essential in every business unit and department and RACI Matrix aims to make it an easy, transparent and fast process. At the meeting the participants decide who is going to be Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed about actions and decisions.

RACI Matrix #gamestorming #project management #action 

Sometimes responsibilities aren’t clear. By creating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix, a group will tackle the responsibility problem directly.

For a structured idea generation session use Brainwriting that allows everyone in the room to share his or her ideas and contribute to ideas of others. It is great exercise if you want to give voice to the less talkative people or you work with a team where relatively everyone is a stranger to each other.

Brainwriting #gamestorming #idea generation 

Some of the best ideas are compilations from multiple contributors. Brainwriting is a simple way to generate ideas, share them, and subsequently build on them within a group. Access to multiple hands, eyes, and minds can yield the most interesting results.

The advantage of these methods is that they foster co-creation and innovative thinking among the group while still take into account the possible limitations of a business meeting. The descriptions provide enough information to everyone who is aiming to lead or facilitate the meeting. At the end of the methods are usually tips and suggestions to consider when facilitating or when more seasoned facilitators would like to bring the exercise to a more advanced level.

Are you ready to facilitate the best meetings you have ever had with gamestorming practices? Go ahead and find the ones that fit your need, in the SessionLab public Library of facilitation methods!

If you want to know more about the people behind Gamestorming you may visit their official site or read their detailed book with practical examples: Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers.

And without ever being in the same room while planning the event?

The organizing team of trainers needed a solution to coordinate the design of their train-the-trainer course — something that would make the process of session planning easier and more natural; something that would provide synchronized collaborative work; something that would still feel like a creative process, with Post-it notes and flipcharts, but in a digital environment.

Luckily, they discovered SessionLab, a tool designed for trainers and facilitators.

It enabled their remote team to work together on the planning of training session agendas and workshops.

It comes with the flexibility of moving around the modules of your sessions, just as you can move Post-it notes on a wall. It makes you focus on the structure of your workshop, which helps to elevate your session plan from good to great.

On top of all that it has an open library of more than 400 training and workshop activities.

Youth Trainers Academy (YTA) is an international train-the-trainer event held annually, training 30 participants from around the world. A team of 10 trainers from varied backgrounds and countries work together, to equip the participants with the skills necessary to design and facilitate soft skill training sessions.

Through a series of workshops the instructors guide the group members through the whole process of training design and delivery, from preparation to evaluation.

Herve Tunga, international trainer and one of the co-founders of YTA, shared his journey of organizing the train-the-trainer event before he discovered SessionLab, and explained how the workflow of the organization changed after he acquired the tool.

Let’s make planning great again!

When YTA came to life in early 2011 to educate students and young professionals with the skills needed to deliver effective training sessions, the planning phase of the course was a real challenge for the founders.

It took several hours using Excel-like software, and many hours of Skype conversations.

In addition there were the burdens of virtual team management, making sure everyone is updated on the latest progress, and ensuring that everyone had the same documents and timetables in front of them.

To put the event’s program into a structure in a digital format, the trainer’s team chose Excel. However, Excel was not a tool designed for training sessions and workshop agendas, and it took quite some work to learn how to use it for the purpose of flexible planning.

Excel is a tool that is more suitable for calculations and those kinds of things and also flexible enough to create a basic agenda. But obviously if you want to make a change you need to know how to do that so Excel isn’t destroying your spreadsheet

They needed a better, more sophisticated solution that would support the whole workflow of planning a train-the-trainer program, from collecting ideas, to forming them into session elements with an easy-to-see-through structure.

That’s when Herve met SessionLab. The tool was designed to support the whole process of planning a workshop or an event. He immediately became interested in trying it.

When I opened the application for the first time, it definitely looked like a great tool for designing session plans. I was more of an analog type person, using post-it notes and flipcharts. SessionLab brought me the same feeling but in a digital environment.

As the team gradually got to know the tool, they discovered the numerous ways it supported session planning.

In the early phases of planning a session on a specific subject, a lot of ideas would pop up, but there was no effective way to keep them in mind, let alone store them for later use. This resulted in either piles of post-its for reusable ideas, or simply forever lost ideas. However with SessionLab every idea or session element can be saved.

The great thing is that when you have an idea, you can simply put it into a block and then move it around, to see how this idea fits into the session. Or you can move it aside if you think you are not going to use it this time. To reuse former sessions and simply to drag and drop modules from other sessions—these are lot of super cool things. So the tool brings a lot of flexibility.

What about the rainbow?

There is no training session without the key elements: exercises and theories. Most of the trainers know that in order to have a balanced session you need a balanced mix of theory, exercise, debriefing and discussions. Regular coffee breaks and energizer activities are useful, too.

To keep in mind all these elements, and on top of that the timing, especially if you are planning a 10-day train-the-trainer event with numerous sessions, can be troublesome.

SessionLab offers a built-in timing system where you can set a starting time, and the system automatically calculates the length of a workshop based on the length of each module you have in your session. You can easily adjust the timing for any of the blocks in your session, and your overall timing stays correct—even when you drag and drop the blocks around your session plan.

Moreover, it has a color coding option to give a quick overview of the balance and interaction mix of the workshop.

The color coding gives me the sense of variety that you need for a session. It is a visual way to see that you are not using the same method for too long in a session. For instance it helps me realize: ‘Hey I need an exercise or a discussion!’ So at a glance you can see that yes, I have a session that is active and engaging.

Collaboration made easy

As the years passed and more and more people applied to the program, the initial team of trainers grew from six to around twelve. This would normally mean that collaborating and planning sessions together is much harder and challenging than before, except that according to Herve this is not the case:

Once the session’s goals are clarified it is very easy to collaborate and work together in the application. You just have a Skype call with your co-trainers while SessionLab is opened in another window, so you can discuss the agenda, move modules, add new ideas at the same time. This simplifies the whole process of creating a session with someone.

Naturally, the least popular part of every workshop or training program is documentation, and reporting to partners or sponsors. However, having the overview of the program in a structured, clear format that is easily understandable for everyone simplifies the life of a trainer.

When the event is over, then comes documentation. We communicate with the event partners, and they get the list of sessions that we have. We share with them a link that leads to a shared overview of the workshops of the program This way they can directly see the outcomes of our work.

The journey doesn’t stop here..

What changed for Herve and the organizing team of YTA when they started to use SessionLab, a tool designed for trainers and facilitators?

It helped their team to get over the hurdles of designing a complex training event with a remote team. It brought them the type of efficiency that you experience when you work together with your colleagues in front of a large wall with Post-its.

Instead of having to manage dozens of spreadsheets, double-checking time calculations, and trying to visualize whether their sessions are designed with a proper interaction mix, SessionLab spares them all this mental energy.

It allows the team to focus on what really matters: to deliver a unique, once-in-a-lifetime learning experience for the participants.

Are you interested in a first-hand experience of how SessionLab can help your team? Go ahead and try it for your next workshop of training session. If you are currently designing workshops or training

What makes the online collaboration work well for you? Do you have favourite online tools that makes remote teamwork easier?

Let us know in the comments below, and thank you for reading!

Nowadays when we graduate from the university and get our diplomas there is one thing we need to face as soon as possible: our learning journey does not stop when we throw our hats into the sky. To stay relevant in the job market and at our workplaces, we constantly have to learn, explore and master new skills. We need to become lifelong learners. Even though this is nowadays almost self-evident, in 1994 it was still a new and a bit vague concept.

In that same year Lars Lundh, Jonathan Briggs, and David Erixon were sitting in a bar, discussing a project. They came to the realization that night that the digital era was upon us. Therefore not just individuals but organizations needed to change their way of learning and become lifelong learners to stay ahead of their game. They had a vision in mind: to build an institution where professional and personal learning would be equally important, learning design would be based on flexibility and the ability to deal with change. Soon they discovered a place – a former military prison – that seemed the perfect fit for the school they envisioned. Hyper Island was born.

After almost 25 years a lot has changed in our world, trends have come and gone but the mission that was created by the co-founders stayed the same: to design immersive learning experiences for students and industry professionals, with the aim of developing participants into lifelong learners.

To support learners along their way they introduced Hyper Island Toolbox which contains 75 exercises and activities that can be applied in the workplace by anyone who wants to enhance collaboration, creativity and learning-by-doing in teams on a daily basis. This approach would enable teams to grow, individuals to build competence, to boost confidence and seize their potential, ultimately making organizations more adept in a world of constant change.

Methodically the Toolbox was built on 3 main guidelines. The first one is learning-by-doing. This widely used learning approach has four steps: a concrete experience, reflection on that experience, drawing conclusions and applying these conclusions. Exploring Client Centricity follows the same four steps while participants need to focus on being more client-centric.

Exploring Client Centricity #hyperisland #innovation #explore and understand 

Client-centricity” (or “client-focus”) is an approach to business based on putting the client/customer at the center of an organization’s philosophy, strategy, and operations. This exercise promotes collaborative exploration and reflection around an organization’s approach to its clients. Participants discuss and share positive experiences they have had as clients, and use this to define their approach to “client-centricity” as a group. They discuss different groups of clients based on needs, and explore how successfully the organization has met those needs in the past. The exercise ends with a prioritization of areas for improvement.

The second guideline is reflection. The practice of reflection enables individuals and organizations to learn more and develop quicker. For instance, History Map can be used as a collective reflection exercise at the end of a team project.

History Map #hyperisland #team 

The main purpose of this activity is to remind and reflect on what group members or participants have been through and to create a collective experience and shared story. Every individual will gain a shared idea of what the group has been through together. Use this exercise at the end of a project or program as a way to reinforce learnings, celebrate highlights and create closure.

Finally, the third one is designing a workshop. The tools in the Toolbox are designed to be used individually or in combinations within workshops. 3 Action Steps can be a good example of that, it can be used on its own or as a part of a workshop to define the steps of an action plan.

3 Action Steps #hyperisland #action 

This is a small-scale strategic planning session that helps groups and individuals to take action toward a desired change. It is often used at the end of a workshop or programme. The group discusses and agrees on a vision, then creates some action steps that will lead them towards that vision. The scope of the challenge is also defined, through discussion of the helpful and harmful factors influencing the group.

Are you ready to get familiar with different prototyping or feedback techniques, master your project management and teamwork skills or become the battery of your group by providing great energisers when the energy level is decreasing in your team? With a high-quality yet simple and understandable Hyper Island Toolbox by your side, it is easier than ever! Another good news for you is that now you can find all Hyper Island methods in the SessionLab public library of facilitation methods. Take a look at them and don’t forget to mark your favourites along the way!

If you want to know more about Hyper Island, the courses they offer, their activities or the community and team behind them, visit www.hyperisland.com for further information.

What is your favourite Hyper Island method? Let us know in the comments!