A resource kit you can use to apply creative collaboration and unleash potential in your team or organization.
Tools to inject energy into the process, get people moving, and have fun.
Tools to unleash creativity, discover valuable insights, and develop new products and services.
Tools for personal development, reflection, self-awareness and how to integrate learning and grow.
Tools focused on implementation, and driving and supporting change in organizations.
Tools to build effective teams - foster trust and openness for better collaboration.
World Café is a simple yet powerful method, originated by Juanita Brown, for enabling meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that are relevant and important to them. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines. Participants then self-organize and explore a set of relevant topics or questions for conversation.
Setting: Create a casual, welcoming environment, most often modelled after a café, (i.e., small round tables covered with paper, colored markers, plants or flowers, and optional item to use as a "talking stick". There should be four to six chairs per table.
Welcome and introduction: begin with a welcome and an introduction to the World Café process, setting the context, sharing guidelines, and putting participants at ease. See the World Café website for further background and participant guidelines.
Questions: each round is guided by a question or questions designed for the specific context and desired purpose of the session. There can be a single questions that all tables discuss or different questions at each table. The same questions can be used for more than one round, or they can be built upon each other to focus the conversation or guide its direction.
The questions should be compelling, open, energizing and relevant to the context. Questions are usually set by participants themselves and created before the session begins.
Small group rounds: The process begins with the first of three or more twenty-minute rounds of conversation for the small groups at each table. During the rounds participants explore the question in focus in an open way. A designated “table host” should support the flow of conversation without leading. At least one person should have the responsibility to “record” the conversation on large paper, using words and drawings.
At the end of each twenty-minute round, participants move to new tables. One persons stays at each table as a "table host" for the next round, welcoming the next group and briefly filling them in on what happened in the previous round.
Harvest: After the small groups (and/or in between rounds, as desired) individuals are invited to share insights or other results from their conversations with the rest of the larger group.
See the World Cafe website for more resources and guidelines.
The purpose of this simple exercise is to demonstrate three key principles useful for creativity and idea generation: quantity is a condition for quality; building on the ideas of others; the ideas we come up with are usually all the same. The format is simple, with small groups standing and drawing apples. At the end of the exercise the whole group reflects and draws out learnings and reflections.
IDOARRT is a simple tool to support you to lead an effective meeting or group process by setting out clear purpose, structure and goals at the very beginning. It aims to enable all participants to understand every aspect of the meeting or process, which creates the security of a common ground to start from. The acronym stands for Intention, Desired Outcome, Agenda, Rules, Roles and Responsibilities and Time.
A short activity to run early in a program, focused on sharing fears, anxieties and uncertainties related to the program theme. The purpose is to create openness within a group. The stinky fish is a metaphor for "that thing that you carry around but don’t like to talk about; but the longer you hide it, the stinkier it gets." By putting stinky fish (fears and anxieties) on the table, participants begin relate to each other, become more comfortable sharing, and identify a clear area for development and learning.
A team-building activity in which a group is challenged to physically support one another in an endeavor to move from one end of a space to another. It requires working together creatively and strategically in order to solve a practical, physical problem. It tends to emphasize group communication, cooperation, leadership and membership, patience and problem-solving.
This workshop aims to help participants define, decide and achieve their goals. By supporting participants to envision where they want to be in a number of years on a holistic level, and defining the steps that will take them there, participants get a clearer picture of the action they need to take.
This exercise is useful for bringing groups together, to create interpersonal bonds, and to build trust. Participants stand opposite each other and have 30 seconds to give appreciative feedback to the other person. The group rotates until everyone has given feedback to everyone else. It is often used as part of wrap-up activities, to create an energized feeling to leave with.