News – Blog
16 March 2022
We’ve collated our favourite techniques and tools which help us facilitate engaging and productive workshops, to help you get the best out of your participants during such sessions.
Between the sessions we run with partners to explore potential Challenge prizes through to the some of the non-financial support sessions we include in many of our programmes, here at Challenge Works we end up facilitating quite a lot of workshops.
We recently caught up internally to compare notes about some of our best facilitation tips and tricks, and we thought we’d share with you eight of some of our favourite workshop resources.
We love this blog from Lizzie Cass-Maran to help explain the importance of inclusive icebreakers. In her blog she digs into a couple of examples of common icebreakers and alternatives that are more inclusive; once you understand the importance of inclusive icebreakers this guide from Stonehill College at MIT gives you way more examples.
Quite a few of these are a little education-specific but there are also some which can be really helpful if you’re looking to help build strong teams or get to know each other quickly – a couple of favourites in there include the ever-popular Human Bingo and Whose story is it – which is a bit of a twist on Two Truths and a Lie.
Over the past 24 months, we’ve been getting creative having an energizer at the beginning of each of our team meetings. There are a couple that it’s obvious a lot of the team enjoy:
One we have shamelessly stolen from the fab Nesta Discovery team is a Bad Ideas Workshop, based on this HBR article by Ayse Birsel. It’s a lot of fun and can really help you avoid getting stuck in group-think and letting your assumptions guide potential solutions to a problem by opening up your horizons. It’s also a good one for when you actually are stuck or out of ideas.
The way we’ll now use this one is:
we’ll explore all the possible bad ideas we can think of in 10 minutes (using words like unethical, impossible (or even evil) to get people’s creativity flowing)
Then we’ll pick a couple of favourites and explore:
When you’re trying to dig into or understand a problem with a new group of people, we’ve found a personas workshop really helpful to understand problems from different perspectives. Nesta have a handy persona toolkit to get you started. Typically we’ll customise this to focus on the problem at hand.
First, in groups we’ll create our imaginary person (or organisation) – giving them habits and talking about their favourite breakfast or if it’s an organisation, the kind of office party they have. We sometimes draw the person/organisation too. It really helps people to switch mindset and see things from a new perspective.
Once we’re all imagining the person, then we dig into the problem a bit more and think through the current issues that person is facing and also what the ‘ideal’ might look like from them. If you’re used to creating user stories in agile, think as this as a ‘level above’ thinking about the person/user as a whole rather than focusing on specific journeys.
Nesta has some created some really useful templates and resources over the years. Sometimes they can be a bit hidden so here are some direct links:
Development Impact & You (DIY Toolkit)
This was developed to support international development – but it has a range of tools you can use to:
Originally developed to support people to create creative hubs, this resource is packed full of useful approaches to support you to launch something new. For example this includes some useful tools to:
There are also quite a few standalone worksheets:
Explore many more tools in the Nesta toolkits section.
