Addressing & Overcoming Fear
A guided inward exercise on a personal fear. Participants breathe, place their hands over the heart, close their eyes, and identify what they are afraid of — the handbook names…
Acting A1
Courage
Standing up for fundamental values, making decisions, taking action, and, when needed, questioning and disrupting established structures and views.
Tools for this skill (22)
Angels In The Closet
For three to five minutes each, talk about the angels in your closet — what you are proudest of, as boastfully as you can bear and a little more — and hear back what struck the…
Bloody Potato
Everyone moves around the room with their eyes closed, hands out, whispering 'potato' to whoever they meet. One person, chosen by a tap on the back, whispers 'bloody potato' ins…
Calculated risk-taking practices
Significant achievement requires risk. Collective courage involves calculated risk-taking—risks that are proportionate to potential benefits, informed by analysis, and bounded.…
Courage Prompt
Sustainability work often requires courage—to speak up, to challenge unsustainable practices, to maintain commitments under pressure. This practice helps identify what responsib…
Creating permission for courageous voice
One of the most common failures of courage in teams is silence—not raising concerns, not voicing disagreement. Establish explicit norms that speaking up about concerns is expect…
Dance in the Middle
To fast, energising music, whoever wants to goes into the middle of the circle and dances however they like while everyone else copies. When they have had enough they rejoin the…
Fight Lab
In threes, one person names the block holding them back most in leadership or life, and the other two stage a scenario, in the moment, meant to trigger it. When it does, the per…
Free Falling
One player stands in the middle of a close circle, closes their eyes and lets themselves fall; the others catch them. The source describes a raised variation from a chair or tab…
Great Guru Game
In threes who know each other, one becomes the guru; the petitioner names the guru's gift, asks a real question from their life as if they had travelled weeks to ask it, receive…
Making Courageous Decisions
Participants practice recognizing fear in the moment of decision and acting on values anyway — informed by Theory U's letting-go and letting-come: releasing the safe option, all…
My Natural Next Step
A two-hour workshop for the values–behaviour gap: each participant identifies a small sustainability-related change they keep avoiding because it is uncomfortable, explores with…
Scorpion
Players mill about with eyes closed while one of them, tapped on the shoulder beforehand, kills by squeezing a forearm. The victim screams, opens their eyes and is out. Players…
Solitaire
Players line both sides of a run. One person sprints its length with their eyes closed while the others keep them straight and catch them at the far end. The source notes how ha…
Standing firm on principles under pressure
Teams regularly face pressure to compromise their principles—including pressure on environmental and social responsibility commitments. Clarify in advance what principles the te…
Step Up Your Courage
A scale-walking coaching format in triads: each person places their current courage level for a real challenge on a physical 1–10 line, walks the scale, visualises the journey u…
The Difficult Conversation Initiation
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Courage (VCoL collection): Identify a conversation you have been avoiding. Ask: 'What is the cost of continuing to avoid this?' Set a ti…
The Small Stand
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for courage: whenever an easier option would quietly compromise a value — staying silent, going along, softening the truth — pause, name the…
The Square
A square marked on the floor. When you step into it you have to do something — a sound, a movement — and you may associate to whatever you happen to see. You are not allowed to…
The Voice Despite Fear
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Courage (VCoL collection): When you notice yourself staying silent despite having something important to contribute, pause. Acknowledge…
Tossing
Eight players form two lines, mesh their forearms into a platform, and launch another player into the air and catch them. The source's practical note is that gripping each other…
Toward the Wall
One at a time, people walk from one wall to the opposite one with their eyes closed, trying to stop as close to the wall as they can. Someone always spots so that nobody walks s…
Also develops it (38)
"How we work together" dialogues
To create space for explicit discussion of team dynamics. Periodically dedicate time to dialogue focused on how the team works together. Topics might include: • How do we typica…
Active and Passive
Two people play a five-minute scene in which one is active — establishing who they are, where they are and why — while the other establishes nothing new and simply affirms every…
Anonymous Confessions
Everyone writes down something they have never told anyone, or rarely share; the slips go into a basket; each person draws one and reads it to the circle as if it were their own…
Anticipating and addressing emerging issues
Many problems are easier to address when they are small than when they have grown into crises. Create regular practices for scanning the horizon: • What is coming that the team…
Anybody Else?
Chairs in a circle, one fewer than people; whoever stands in the middle says something true — left-handed, uneasy about their height, attracted to someone in this room — and ask…
Applause
One at a time a volunteer steps into the circle and does or says anything at all for at least five seconds. The group applauds fiercely — regardless of what it was. Then the nex…
Be Your Own Angel
Standing in a circle behind a chair-back or pillow, eyes closed, a guided meditation asks each person for a way of being to leave behind and one to step into; when it feels righ…
Breakdowns to Breakthroughs
Treats a breakdown in a project or team as expected rather than exceptional — the guide states plainly that there will be breakdowns — and works the method for turning one into…
Building and maintaining psychological safety
To create an environment where team members feel safe to express themselves, take risks, and be vulnerable. Psychological safety is built through consistent behavior over time:…
Building norms that welcome constructive challenge
To create a team culture where questioning and challenging ideas is expected and valued. Deliberately cultivate norms: • Explicitly discuss and agree that constructive challenge…
Bumblebee
Partners converse only by singing a few lines of whatever song comes to mind in reply — and not one thought of while the other was singing. Named for the Transformer who could o…
Compassionate accountability
To address performance issues and concerns in ways that maintain care for the person while being honest about the problem. Compassion does not mean avoiding difficult conversati…
Constructive disagreement practices
Disagreement is inevitable and can be productive or destructive. Establish norms that make disagreement safe and productive: • Focus on issues rather than people—critique ideas,…
Creating permission for productive failure
To reduce the fear of failure that suppresses experimentation. Explicitly establish that thoughtful experiments that do not succeed are valued, not punished. Distinguish: • Prod…
Creative Destruction (aka TRIZ)
Serious fun with a subversive question: "what could we do to reliably achieve the WORST possible result?" Groups list that anti-recipe, then — the uncomfortable step — mark ever…
Dedicated exploration time
To protect time specifically for creative exploration. Allocate regular time where the team explores new ideas without the requirement to deliver immediate outcomes. During this…
Designated challenger role
To ensure important proposals receive genuine critical examination. When discussing significant decisions or plans, assign one team member the role of designated challenger. Thi…
Despair Ritual
A communal ritual in which sorrows for the world are spoken archetypally — moving between small groups and the whole circle, voices joined and witnessed — building emotional sol…
Empathy Walk
Choose a person significantly different from you — across a boundary of politics, faith, class, life experience — invite them for a walk, and practice holding space across that…
Group Giving Game (Would Y'all?)
Anyone may make a request of the whole group — to enact something together — and anyone uncomfortable raises a hand to change it, for themselves or for everyone; anyone can stop…
Heave Ho
Sixteen or more players form two facing lines and link hands into a platform, and one player is passed hand over hand from one end to the other. The source asks for shoes, coins…
Hot Seat
A volunteer takes the chair and names the intensity they want — mild, medium or spicy — and the group asks probing questions to match, 'interested, not interesting' ones that ke…
I Love Myself!
On your turn, say one thing you love about yourself; if nothing comes, throw your hands up and declare you love everything about yourself. A game-shaped way into self-talk the m…
Insult Each Other
Two groups on opposite sides of the room take turns insulting each other. It may end with the groups face to face shouting, and hopefully everyone enjoying it. The source sugges…
Interrupting and Following Aliveness
One partner talks for four minutes about something fairly boring from their week; at least every thirty seconds the other has to interrupt with a question they genuinely want an…
Mudra Theatre
Chairs face one side of the room; whoever steps on stage expresses whatever arises, for as long as the facilitator lets it cook, with one rule: nothing they thought of beforehan…
Periodic values-behavior alignment review
To examine whether actual behavior aligns with stated values. Review the team's stated values. For each value, discuss: 1. Where have we lived this value well recently? What are…
Pre-Mortem Analysis
Before finalizing a significant plan, the team imagines it is months later and the initiative has failed completely — then everyone writes down why. Causes are clustered and the…
Public Narrative (Self / Us / Now)
Marshall Ganz's leadership storytelling craft: build a Story of Self (a choice point that shows why you are called), a Story of Us (shared values and experience of the community…
Stop
Partners stand across the room; one walks toward the other, who may only say 'stop' — no touch — and the walker stops only when they truly feel like stopping. Not persuasion but…
Taking initiative without waiting for permission
In many teams, initiative is stifled by assumption that action requires explicit permission. Create explicit permission for initiative. Make clear that people are expected to ac…
The Giving Game ("Would You?")
For five to ten minutes one person asks for exactly what they want from or with their partner, right now — physical, mental or emotional — refining the request until it is preci…
The Old Pike
One player is the old pike; everyone else are small fish along a wall who want to cross the lake. On the pike's signal they run, and a fish the pike touches takes root on the la…
Tonglen Meditation
The Tibetan practice of exchange: breathing IN the suffering of another — or one's own, or the world's — as heavy, hot darkness, and breathing OUT relief, spaciousness, and well…
Truth Mandala
A ritual structure for honoring pain for the world. The circle is divided into quadrants holding symbolic objects — a stone (fear), dead leaves (sorrow), a stick (anger), an emp…
Walk With Me
One person circles the inside of the group saying 'walk with me if…' and something true about themselves; everyone who shares it gets up and walks too, and any walker may offer…
What I Need From You (WINFY)
Functions or teams that depend on each other each formulate their top needs from the others as crisp requests. Spokespeople exchange them in a public circle — and answer only "y…
Yee-haw!
Four calls with four gestures — yee-haw passes round the circle, rattlesnake reverses it, hoedown skips a person, lasso throws it across — learned one at a time and then played…