This is the last of four posts covering facilitation games for the different phases of meetings – Check In, Opening, Exploring, Closing.

Closing activities form the “future” section of the agenda. Following the Exploring phase, they are focused around the question ‘How do our new insights help us move into the future?’

As with Opening and ‘Exploring-Divergent’ activities, there is a lot of overlap between ‘Exploring-Convergent’ and Closing activities. For me the distinction is the move to a planning phase: establishing a goal to move forward with, and the activities to support it. If the focus of the session is Planning, this could use up to half the allotted time, for others around a third to a quarter.

It’s also important to be aware of the time span available to implement change, and have the group select the most valuable area of focus within that context.

Ranking / Selecting:

Finding the right focus is much more reliable when multiple interests are represented – it’s easier to avoid personal agendas and generates more discussion around what really is valuable and possible. Selection criteria, such as ‘what we are able to do now,’ ‘what fits best with our team objectives’ and ‘what do we have most passion for’, play a significant part in identifying an achievable goal the whole team is committed to.

• Ordering – Simply placing the ideas in priority order on the board is a good quick way to agree on importance – a variation is to have the group do this in silence at first, to identify debate-worthy areas.
• Dot voting – quick technique using scarcity to clarify personal commitment
• Impact / Effort Matrix – timeless sorting method for short / medium / long term plans (Innovgames.com has an online version as well)
• Other decision-making grids: using the framework above, rank items by ‘Risk vs Impact’, ‘Importance vs Urgency’ and so on
• Thirty-Five – great technique for sharing and ranking ideas in one, esp with an added twist of selling each idea as you go along. Works as a quick-and-dirty ranking method for generating and selecting ideas for discussion in groups of 10 and up – not ideal for finalizing critical issues

Goals:

While it’s generally agreed that we should create SMART goals, it’s hard to find activities that support goal clarification. Esther Derby’s article on Double Loop Learning provides some excellent questions to interrogate the goals for validity; and I use this format in retrospectives:

• Goal Focus – Friendly way to ensure goals are SMART: once you have consensus on a goal, ask the questions: Can we do it? Why is it important? What could stop us from achieving it? How will we know when it’s done? Clarifies that the goal is appropriate for the skills & responsibilities of the team, as well as the time allotted.

Consensus:

Physical interaction tends to be a more effective way to indicate the level of commitment or agreement than a purely verbal response, and is more likely to surface any hesitation, making it easier to clarify the boundaries of what can be achieved.

• Thumb vote – powerfully simple indication of agreement: Thumb up: I agree / support this goal; Sideways: neither agree nor disagree – will vote with whatever the group chooses; Down: I don’t support this goal / don’t think we should do it now.
• Fist of Five – more detailed than a thumb vote, showing degree of alignment
• Vote with your feet – Physical & spatial vote, nice for large groups: for comparative values, have participants stand somewhere along a line indicating their position on an issue. Gets the group moving, shows physical choice of position, and creates a 3D graph of the spread of commitment
• Jump vote – Fun physical ice-breaker type vote in which each member jumps to indicate their level of commitment, enjoyment, intention etc. – ideally for lighthearted topics and large groups. Use a circle format for a quick opening or closing.

Actions:

This nuts-and-bolts section identifies how to take a new possibility to a new reality, and could feel tiring or exciting – it helps to get this pace right. Again, it’s important to limit the actions to a realistic number.

• Problem Solving Tree – Consistently asking “How can we do that?” generates detailed actions for solving issues (another version here)
• Graphic Gameplan – Identify major steps required for meeting each objective – nice for high-level project views, and a good way to generate collaborative plans; also a nice Exploring activity for focused planning sessions
• Who / What / When Matrix – For simpler goals, generate the action plan collaboratively

Close:

I try to close all facilitated sessions with a quick feedback format that allows participants to review the experience, helps me to get to know the teams better, and helps me improve as a facilitator. The higher the trust relationship, the better the feedback, the more trust is built … and so on.

• Plus / Delta or Keep / Change: What was positive, what to change
• Start / Stop / Continue: Quick version of the Exploring game
• Helped / Hindered / Hypothesis: helps frame how well participants were able to contribute (from Agile Retrospectives)
• WIIFM – Review the What’s In It For Me notes created in the Check In phase – gives feedback on whether expectations were met, and generates interesting discussion around what was learned in the course.

Another wrap-up mechanism is sharing individual perspectives; I do these in call-out fashion:

• Three wishes – Some things I’d love to see happen (from Agile Retrospectives)
• 1 Takeaway – One thing I’ve gained from this session
• Temperature Reading – Good debrief technique for longer sessions
• Appreciations – Nice way to highlight contributions that otherwise would likely go unnoticed, and end the session on a positive note (from Agile Retrospectives)

Most of these activities come from books, blogs or training sessions I’ve been part of; some I’ve created to meet specific needs. Where I can find attributions they are noted; if you see any I’ve missed, or know of links I haven’t found, please let me know in the comments below.

This is the third of four posts covering facilitation games for the different phases of meetings – Check In, Opening, Exploring, Closing.

Exploring is essentially the ‘Present’ phase of facilitation, with two major sections within it: Exploring: Divergent and Exploring: Convergent.

Divergent games feel a lot like ‘Part 2’ to Data Gathering – and I think it is a bit of a grey area: I often find them so closely linked that the two sections can be combined, but sometimes there is value in having them both. Then Convergent exercises consolidate our findings in preparation for moving to the “Future” phase.

As I understand complexity theory in software development, the Exploring section relates to managing emergence, and ‘sensing’ in Cynefin’s Probe – Sense – Respond model. It’s this level of investigation that helps us to see what effects our actions are really having, identify positive and negative patterns that may be developing, as well as highlight unexpected areas of potential.

Exploring: Divergent

Here, we want to delve further into issues that are important, extending our understanding by looking through a different lens – of brainstorming, understanding risk, or in-depth analysis.

Generate Ideas / Breakthrough thinking:
I was fortunate to attend a session with Darian Rashied called “Facilitating Creativity for Breakthrough Problem Solving” at the London Scrum Gathering last year. In it, Darian explained how unexpected connections work to generate ideas: things that make no sense keep us occupied, we can’t walk away from them. This means we reach deeper and cross boundaries we would usually stay well within, in order to resolve the senselessness. According to John Medina in Brain Rules, this can even carry through to our sleep, hence the term “sleep on it”.

Using de Bono’s framework, Darian reinterpreted the game phases as follows:

Opening > Exploring (divergent) > Exploring (cohesive) > Closing
Provocation > Movement > Harvesting > Treatment

Provocation: ridiculous, fun, laughing – getting out of the serious mode activates a different part of brain which frees up our imagination
Movement: activities that stimulate mental leaps help us escape our normal, tried-and-tested thought patterns
Harvesting: reaping the benefit of our slightly altered viewpoints by creating space for the ridiculous, accepting and investigating all ideas
Treatment: taking ridiculous ideas and reshaping them back to practical applications

While some of the ideas below may seem whacky, they really do generate at the very least some interesting new viewpoints.

• Random Input: Idea generating technique that works by aligning the problem with the attributes of a random object (played in Darian’s workshop, from Edward de Bono’s How To Have Creative Ideas)
• Brainwriting: Generate ideas and share them, expanding on each others ideas as you go (also in Gamestorming)
• Anti-Problem: Solving the opposite of your problem helps to view the issue from an ‘opposite’ perspective, and promotes both idea generation and a “re-view” of your current processes
• Destruction Plan: Taking the Anti-Problem to an extreme, this game harnesses our apparently abundant destructive abilities to create awareness of tools, processes & ideas we don’t normally consider, then reframe them for positive effect (played in Darian’s workshop).

Root Cause Analysis²:
Sometimes we encounter issues that are really symptoms of deeply rooted organizational impediments. This is especially valid for recurring issues, as well as catastrophic events. Here we need to dig deep to unpack the root cause of the problem.

• 5 Why’s: Originally from the Toyota kata, this method uses 5 as a heuristic number of times we need to ask “Why” something happened to get to a level of human cause(s), such as flawed process or incorrect assumptions
• Cause and Effect Diagrams: These diagrams make visible all the ‘symptoms’ that need to be addressed, their apparent causes and their effects, and highlight the reinforcing loops. This is a valuable aid for identifying ‘attractors’ to enhance positive loops, and ‘dampeners’ to weaken the negative – making it possible to make decisions on what should be resolved in which order, and how we expect it to impact the rest of the system.  (Ishikawa diagrams are an alternative form of this, which I haven’t worked with)

² I owe this section to Carlo Kruger’s A3 Thinking session which he presented to SUGSA at the beginning of this month – Thanks Carlo!

Other formats:
These two formats are complete facilitation plans for generating insight from opposite standpoints: a strength-based, imagi-planning approach, and analytic problem analysis:

• Appreciative Inquiry – Highly creative full retrospective technique for generating new ideas from a positive foundation. I find that future-specting is quite hard to grasp for teams unfamiliar with agile games, so for less exploratory teams I’ve replaced this with an outcomes-focused exercise.
• A3 Thinking – Toyota’s methodical ‘total picture’ approach to understanding issues and testing corrective measures. Incorporates root cause analysis techniques into a detailed improvement plan. Great for significant issues, overkill for small ones.

Exploring: Convergent

Once we’ve expanded our view, we need to start the converging process, making sense of what we have uncovered. These sorting exercises help to clarify where ideas are overlapping and identify dominant themes and needs. I typically do all of these in a session, with more or less detail as time allows.

Grouping > Clarifying > Interpreting

• Clustering – The process of grouping associated ideas provides a the first step to identifying underlying causes, and also highlights unity and differences in a group
• Identify Themes – Having the team name the clusters of post-its encourages discussion about and agreement on the grouping, providing a nice organic approach to determining categories (from Agile Retrospectives)
• Debrief – Open questions that bring attention to emerging patterns – can be done as a quick round-robin or murmur group exercise (from Agile Retrospectives)

Through exploring our situation we seem to be answering the question ‘What does what we know about the Past tell us about the Present?’. By uncovering underlying themes and discovering experiments yet to be tried, we put ourselves in a position of strength – able to apply our insights in a way that can shape our future.

We take this information into the Closing section to identify specific probes to set up and actions to take that will help us get there.

Most of these activities come from books, blogs or training sessions I’ve been part of; some I’ve created to meet specific needs. Where I can find attributions they are noted; if you see any I’ve missed, or know of links I haven’t found, please let me know in the comments below.