Facilitation Techniques & Group Methods
Structures for running group sessions and workshops
17 tools in this category
- 35 Game (Thiagi) — A blind card-trading exercise where the group's own ideas get rated by strangers, so the best idea wins on merit rather than on who pitched it.
- A Time to Think — Nancy Kline's method for giving someone real, uninterrupted thinking time instead of advice disguised as help.
- AAR (After Action Review) — Four blunt questions asked right after an event so a team captures the learning while it's fresh.
- Action Learning — A small set works one real problem through questions only, no advice, to build both the solution and the thinker.
- Action Learning Day (2016) — CCL SA's full-day format combining live action-learning sets, input sessions, and a committed follow-up review.
- Design Thinking for Educators — Run IDEO's five-step design process - discovery to evolution - to redesign a programme around real users.
- Facilitation — Design the container, not just the agenda, so a group session produces real thinking and decisions.
- Facilitator Benchmarks — Rate facilitation against observable competency benchmarks to target practice at the real gap.
- Heron's Intervention Styles — Six intervention styles, from directive to supportive, to widen a coach's or leader's default repertoire.
- Hesse Partners — A boutique facilitation and OD firm - curated facilitators design and run retreats, forum programmes and leadership sessions to your brief, not a
- Hot Seats — One person listens while the group gives structured, observed-behaviour feedback in two rounds: improve, then inspire.
- Liberating Structures — Name the participation problem, then run the one of the 33 designs actually built to fix it.
- Presentation Skills — Build one message, three points, and a close - then deliver, get feedback, and go again immediately.
- Sticks Activity — The Helium Stick: a team lowers a light rod using only index fingers - it almost always rises, exposing real coordination habits.
- Thinking Environment — Ten conditions, held together, that let a person think for themselves without being led or interrupted.
- World Cafe — Rotate small groups through the same questions over several rounds to cross-pollinate a whole room's thinking.
- altMBA - Decision Tree — Map a branching decision, weight each outcome by probability and payoff, and pick the highest expected value.