Most teams, regardless of size, can access data measuring their progress towards goals. Use this group activity to validate the strategic alignment of your KPIs, understand the relationships between them, and brainstorm tests you can perform to validate both.
Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming.
A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful.
The Circle of Trust is a tool that can be used both individually and for groups. You can rate your circle of trust - think of your ‘inner circle’; work, school, or another group - to see how diverse the group of people you trust is.
Use Craig Raine's poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.
The Product box is a classic from the Agile games line. The kind of typical workshop that turns an austere meeting room into a middle school classroom. In the usual version, this game needs a few accessories: A4 cardboard boxes, scissors, glue, stickers, and the participant’s imagination... This workshop definitely requires some logistical support. It takes about 2 hours to complete and you need one facilitator to manage 6 to 12 participants max.
Teams are asked to imagine that this product will be sold in a department store, just like another everyday product. As they imagine the product, they make decisions about its name, a slogan, a logo and 3 or 4 key selling points on the front of the packaging. And on the back of the packaging: a detailed description, the prerequisites and the conditions of use.
Individuals express their response to a statement or idea by standing closer or further from a central object. Used with teams to reveal system, hidden patterns, perspectives.
In a circle you must call someone else's name before a zombie gets to you.
Close eyes, then everyone looks across circle at another player and if they make eye contact they scream dramatically and leave the game.
The Diffusion Curve is a reflection and discussion activity based on the theory of the diffusion of innovations. Using the basic principles of the diffusion curve, the activity aims to have participants reflect on the question: in which areas of my life am I: an innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, or laggard? It can also be extended to have participants apply the same lens to the organizations or companies they work for.
This activity helps participants value each other, by focusing on the tiniest actions of kindness. Could be used at the end of a session or workshop.
This method gives goal setting or vision sharing into a more creative, associative frame, making participants move out of their comfort zones.