Aerobics
Players line up; the first walks a circuit of the room and the second follows, moving as they move. After a few rounds the leader peels off to the back and the next pair takes o…
Thinking T2
Perspective Skills
Ability to learn from diverse perspectives and integrate insights into reflective sense-making and action.
Tools for this skill (54)
Building perspective awareness into ongoing practice
To cultivate perspective awareness as an ongoing team capability. Integrate perspective awareness into regular team practices: In decision-making: 'Whose perspective have we not…
Case Clinic
Structured peer-coaching for 5–8 people (~70 minutes): a case giver presents a current leadership challenge at their growing edge; after clarifying questions, the group holds th…
Change the Protagonist
Groups pick a story everyone knows and ask whose story it is as told. Then they retell it from a different character's point of view — the Three Billy Goats Gruff from the middl…
Columbian Hypnosis
One player holds an open hand a few inches from their partner's face and moves it slowly; the partner keeps their face at exactly that distance, so the hand leads the whole body…
Connecting with Climate Science
A stakeholder-circle exercise for policy clients: the client picks a climate issue they find hard to address, maps every stakeholder — voters, party, departments, lobby groups,…
Corridor Encounters
A teacher and a parent run into each other in town. You might imagine the parent's child has been truanting and the teacher had been meaning to get in touch and now has to raise…
Ducklings
One person goes about their business across a room, a building or a city block while the others follow, narrating aloud what they see and what they take it to mean: 'Mama finds…
Experiencing Interdisciplinarity
Participants mind-map one real-world case from several disciplinary perspectives, then hunt for the connections — experiencing the difference between stacking disciplines side b…
Folding Spectrogram
The room becomes the scale: people stand along a line according to their position on a real question, hear voices from different points, then the line folds — bringing the most…
Four Corners
The leader poses a statement with four possible answers, the last of them open, and everyone goes to the corner representing the answer closest to their own view. Each corner th…
Get the Other To
Each of two improvisers is secretly given something they must get the other to do during the scene, neither knowing what the other is working toward — the instructions are given…
Greetings
Players mill about and greet whoever they meet, first plainly and then as a named relationship — a long-lost friend, someone you don't trust, an ex, someone with bad breath. Eac…
Guru of the Altitudes
Each chair is a stage of development from Integral theory — Infrared, Magenta, Red, Amber, Orange, Green, Teal — and whoever sits there embodies it: the Amber chair holds tradit…
Hot seating
One person sits as their character and answers questions in role — first from the facilitator, then from the watching group. They enter the space as the character and leave as t…
I like your hat
Two polite characters who dislike each other meet somewhere ordinary and are too well-mannered to say so. At intervals the scene freezes and one of them steps out to tell the au…
Mirror, Mirror
Describe a situation you would ask advice about; your partner repeats it back verbatim — same pronouns, as much of the same feeling as they can honestly carry — as if it were ha…
Multiple Perspectives Round
Effective sustainability work requires understanding diverse stakeholder perspectives. This helps teams consider how decisions affect different groups and find approaches that w…
Perspective contrast exercises
To sharpen awareness of how different perspectives frame the same issue. When facing a dilemma with different legitimate perspectives, assign small groups to deliberately adopt…
Perspective mapping dialogues
To surface and explore the structure of different perspectives on a shared issue. When facing a significant decision where different views exist, use a structured mapping proces…
Perspective rotation in problem analysis
To systematically examine issues from multiple angles. When analyzing a complex situation, deliberately rotate through different lenses: • Operational lens: practical implementa…
Perspective Yoga
Four short conversations in a row: attention only on yourself; only on your partner; only on the connection between you, treated almost as a third being; only on the wider conte…
Portrait Pictures
Each person draws a portrait of somebody none of them recognises and builds the character they think the picture shows, presenting them by description or by playing them. Groups…
Sensing Journey
Leaving the office to see the system from its edges: small groups visit places and people that matter in the system they work on — users, front lines, forgotten corners — with t…
Servant, Master, Catastrophe
A master calls in a servant to discuss something trivial — dust on the bookshelf. What the master does not know is that a great many disasters have happened today, so when she s…
Shadowing
Learn by silent accompaniment: define a focus question, then spend half a day to a full workday at someone's side — observing their working reality without commenting or helping…
Shared Problem Definition
Stakeholder role-play in which participants from different disciplines and organisations must integrate their perspectives into one shared problem definition before any solution…
Simple Ethnography
Go where the users are: observers spend real time in the field — alone or in pairs — silently watching and recording what people actually do (not what they say they do), then de…
Socio-Spatial Mapping
On location, groups map a place's functional, natural, and social qualities — layering direct observation with local knowledge gathered on site — and integrate what the maps dis…
Spectrum
People place themselves along a line from most to least in answer to a prompt — how engaged they feel, whether they consider themselves lonely or privileged, how much they earn…
Spiral Sentence Stems
Sentence stems written for the altitudes of development — 'my instincts protect me when…', 'I'm awed by the magical mystery of existence when…', 'I'm proud to be part of ___ bec…
Stakeholder Interview
A structured conversation with someone your work affects, built around a short sample questionnaire: what is your most important objective, and how can I help you realize it; wh…
Status bridge
Two people are each shown a playing card nobody else sees — ace is lowest status, king highest — and cross a narrow imaginary footbridge from opposite ends. They embody the stat…
Status Photos
Four people decide what the photograph shows. Two have high status and two low. Then they make a slow transformation and swap status, without leaving the photograph.
Status Scenes
Scenes built on four movements of status: both players lower theirs, both raise theirs, one raises while the other lowers gradually, and status switches abruptly mid-scene. The…
Status Swap
Two people play a pair with assigned characters — child and adult, thief and police, doctor and patient, boss and employee, groupie and star, devil and angel — one high status a…
The Absent Character
Two people improvise a scene about somebody who is not there yet but is on their way. Over at least six to fourteen lines their dialogue has to establish where they are and, abo…
The Behaviour Researcher
The group agrees a setting and each person invents a character who belongs in it. One person leaves; the rest agree on a behaviour they will all share. The improvisation runs wi…
The Difficult Job Interview
A job interview in which the manager has been privately told to be perfectly polite while, without noticing, tearing the candidate's CV into strips, crumpling them and throwing…
The Dissent Invitation
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Perspective Skills (VCoL collection): When you notice consensus forming quickly, pause and invite dissent. Ask: "What might we be missin…
The Emotional Meeting
Four people hold a meeting on a question: numbers one and three are for it, two and four against, and each speaks for a few minutes in turn. Then the same meeting is run again w…
The Other Chair
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Perspective Skills (VCoL collection): Choose a person whose perspective differs from yours. Imagine sitting in their chair, with their r…
The Reframe Game
One person outlines a problem — ideally a difficult conversation they face — and asks for reframes; the others offer different ways of seeing it, each speaking once before anyon…
The Reverse Bus
Chairs are set out as a bus. One person leaves the room and the rest agree on something odd or wrong about them — the source's examples run from an unzipped fly to looking like…
The Seems
Popcorn-style stems that move through four positions: 'I seem…', then 'you seem…' (choosing a person to project onto), 'we seem…', and 'the context is…' — with 'my context is…'…
The Spectators
One group plays being spectators at something. The other group has to work out what they are watching and then perform it — if it is a tennis match, two of them play tennis; if…
The Stakeholder Scan
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Perspective Skills (VCoL collection): Before deciding, take 30 seconds to scan through key stakeholders: "How would this look from the c…
Translator
Two people converse and each has a translator who says, after every line, what is really behind it: 'What I notice about you is that your shirt is tight' becomes 'You're hot and…
Troika Consulting
Peer consulting in trios, ~10 minutes per person: the client shares a challenge and question, turns their back (or turns off video), and listens while the two consultants genera…
Try Me On
Answer 'Who am I? I am…' in a circle, then take off as much clothing as feels comfortable and pass it to the person on your left, put on what you are handed, move around the roo…
User Experience Fishbowl
A small inner circle of people with direct lived experience of something talk candidly among themselves — not presenting, conversing — while the larger community listens from an…
Waited Long?
Four words of dialogue — 'Hi.' 'Hi.' 'Waited long?' 'Ages.' — played four times: both high status, both low, A high and B low, B high and A low. The same words, four different s…
Widening Circles
In groups of four, each person speaks about an issue they care about four times over: first as themselves, then from the perspective of a person who opposes their view — in firs…
Wise Crowds
Peer consultation at any scale: a client presents a challenge and question, answers clarifying questions, then turns away while their consultants — a quartet or a whole ringed r…
Also develops it (74)
3D Mapping (Sculpting the Current Reality)
A team sculpts its current reality with physical objects: stakeholders and — crucially — invisible forces (power, frustration, hope) are each given an object, with distance, siz…
4D Mapping (Social Presencing Theater)
An embodied map of a whole social system: participants physically take the roles of its stakeholders — including marginal and non-human ones — arranging themselves as Sculpture…
Active inclusion practices in meetings and discussions
To ensure diverse perspectives are heard, counteracting patterns where a few voices dominate. Multiple techniques can increase participation breadth: • Round-robin contributions…
Addressing cultural differences constructively
To turn cultural differences into resources for learning rather than sources of friction. Create explicit opportunities to discuss cultural differences and their implications fo…
Adjective Scenes
The audience suggests an adjective — warm, strong, sad, lost — and every actor in the coming scene tries to embody that quality or state as fully as they can. A variation gives…
Animal stories
Students take a single animal's traits — how it moves, sounds and behaves — and apply them to a human character, then rehearse a scene in small groups where each person's charac…
Becoming the Water Body
A perspective-shift practice from the Ocean Ambassadors Compass: imagine being your local river, sea, or one of its animals or plants, and voice its needs and challenges in firs…
Care Ethics Mapping
A 75-minute case exercise from the Uni Bern facilitator guide: for a real complex challenge, map on sticky notes who needs care and who gives it — deliberately including future…
Cartography
For seven minutes one partner maps the other's mind with hypotheticals — would you ever, would you rather, would you like to — answered truthfully, with conditions if needed, go…
Change
One partner tells a story; whenever the other says 'change!', the last thing said has to change. Mostly fun, the manual says — until the Therapeutic variation, where a true, cha…
Collaborative mapping of interconnections
To make visible the connections between factors relevant to a challenge. When facing a complex challenge, dedicate time to mapping the system together. Start by identifying key…
Communication across organizational and cultural boundaries
Effective cross-boundary communication requires attention to different contexts, norms, and needs. Develop awareness of how communication norms differ across boundaries. Differe…
Congregation of Believers
One person testifies for five minutes to an 'article of faith' they used to hold and have begun to doubt — unconditional love, hard work pays, the goodness of government — while…
Constructive Conversations
Practicing genuine dialogue with people who hold genuinely different views on complex problems: listening for the reasoning underneath, advocating one's own perspective without…
Conversation Café
Small tables of 5–7 make sense of a profound or troubling theme through four rounds with a talking object: two rounds where each person speaks uninterrupted, an open conversatio…
Costume Bag
Each person gets a bag of clothes, hats and props prepared in advance and builds a character from what is in it, presenting them either by describing or by dressing up and playi…
Council of All Beings
A communal ritual in which participants set aside their human identity, are "chosen" by another life-form, often make simple masks, and then sit in council speaking AS that bein…
Cross-boundary exposure
To bring in perspectives and ideas from outside the team's usual context. Create regular opportunities to learn from outside the team's usual boundaries: • Invite someone from a…
Cultural Awareness
Builds the ability to communicate across national, ethnic, organisational and generational cultures — the guide treats all four as culture, not just the first two. Participants…
Cultural Dimensions Reflection
A structured group reflection for interculturally mixed teams: learn the main dimensions along which working cultures differ (power distance, individualism/collectivism, uncerta…
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…
Deliberate learning from others
To cultivate the habit of seeking and valuing input from outside the team. Create regular opportunities to learn from people outside the team: • Invite colleagues from other tea…
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…
Dialectical Self-Reflection
A thinking exercise from the Dialectical Thought Form framework (DTF): deliberately re-see yourself through the four dialectical moments — not a static being but a PROCESS (evol…
DTF Cognitive Assessment & Coaching
A structured interview with a trained DTF analyst that maps a person's current patterns of dialectical thinking — which thought forms (structure, process, relation, transformati…
Exchanging Perspectives
Structured rounds — inspired by Liberating Structures' Troika Consulting — in which participants voice and inhabit each other's perspectives on a complex or contested challenge,…
Extending the circle of care
To cultivate the team's capacity to care about those beyond its immediate boundaries. Periodically extend empathic attention beyond the team: • Who is affected by our work that…
Flash back, flash forward
A group freezes a moment as a tableau, then rebuilds it as the moment just before, then as the moment just after — three still images that imply a story either side of the scene…
Follow the Finger
Two people. One points with a finger; the other follows the finger with their whole body — first on the spot, then around the room. Small movements of the finger can produce lar…
Gradual Change
One at a time, people cross the room while gradually transforming their character from one pole to another — good to evil, young to old, ashamed to proud, beautiful to ugly, afr…
If I Were You…
Tell your partner about an experience — a time you felt scared or endangered, or something stuck in your mind — and let them question you greedily, because they will retell it t…
Inner Monologue
A scene is played, and beside it — or in it — stand the players' angels and devils: alter egos who say aloud what each character is 'really' thinking or up to as the scene runs.
Inviting Non-Human Stakeholders
Role-play that adds the missing chairs: participants embody non-human stakeholders — animals, rivers, trees, future ecosystems — inside a real case or project discussion, speaki…
Keeping the Head Still
Walk and talk to each other, some of you keeping the head completely still while speaking, others letting it move and tilt. For some people the still head is impossible; others…
Leadership 101
Each participant names a leader they admire and writes three qualities that make them effective, then a leader they dislike and what makes them bad. The lists go up in two colum…
Learning from external perspectives and critical voices
To ensure the team remains open to learning from those outside its boundaries. Periodically seek input from external perspectives: • Invite a stakeholder or community member to…
Living Things
One character plays a scene and all the other actors are the objects in it — and the objects can talk. Drink a beer and the beer starts talking to you; step into a house and the…
Mirror in Circle
Players find someone across the circle, make eye contact and mirror each other, then walk slowly to the centre still mirroring, arriving at the same moment as everyone else. A v…
Mirror of Perception
The group names qualities it sees in one person, popcorn-style, and that person holds up one to five fingers for how true each feels from inside; then they name qualities they s…
My life story
Groups invent a character who has lived an interesting life, pick six moments from it in order, and stage them as tableaux — a photo album the character narrates while the rest…
On the bus
Chairs are set out as a bus and one person drives. At each stop a new passenger gets on carrying a clear attitude — furious about the delay, newly dumped, finding everything hil…
Peer learning forums
To enable team members to learn from each other's experiences and expertise. Monthly or bimonthly, dedicate 30-45 minutes to peer learning. One or two team members share somethi…
Practices for genuine dialogue
Dialogue is exploratory conversation aimed at developing shared understanding. Creating space for genuine dialogue requires structural conditions and conversational practices. S…
Props
Objects are laid out on the floor; participants wander among them, silently imagining what each might be and how it could be used. When the leader stops them, each picks up what…
Sensemaking Session
Complex sustainability challenges resist simple analysis. Sensemaking helps teams work together to create shared understanding of ambiguous situations, building the collective i…
Shift the Genre
Groups take a story everyone knows, name its genre, and move it to another one. What happens to the romance if it becomes a grand opera? To the horror story if it becomes a come…
Shift the Period
Groups take a known story, work out when it is set from the markers in it — a princess, a castle, a witch, a prince on horseback suggests the Middle Ages — and move it to anothe…
Split Brain
After a short meditation, one person finds two parts of themselves that are at odds, describes how each speaks, and assigns one to each of two partners — who then hold the conve…
Stakeholder Mapping
Identifies who has to be engaged for a change initiative to succeed, sorts them by interest and influence, and turns that into a strategy for building and managing each relation…
Standing on the Line
A question with two opposite answers is mapped onto a line across the room, ideally graded with chairs or numbers, and everyone stands where their view is best expressed. People…
Status Cards on Foreheads
Everyone draws a playing card and wears it on their forehead without seeing it, then plays a scene. Everybody can read everyone else's status but not their own, and you learn wh…
Status Mingle
A cocktail party where half the room plays high status and half plays low, then they swap. The source supplies the physical vocabulary for both — toes turned in, head tilted, ha…
Strange Bedfellow
Each actor is assigned a famous person, and the scene begins with them together in bed. Only the actors know who they are; the audience and the other actors have to guess. The s…
Structured ideation sessions
To generate diverse ideas systematically when facing challenges that require creative thinking. When facing a challenge that requires creative solutions, use a structured proces…
Subject-Object Interview
Kegan's research-grade developmental interview: ~60–90 minutes of structured conversation around prompts (angry, anxious, success, torn…) through which a trained interviewer ass…
Terminator
Two pairs: one asks, one answers — except that the askers may only speak as 'we' ('We notice that you scratch your head whenever you're asked about your family. What's happening…
The Emotional Family
A family scene: the audience picks an activity they are doing together — barbecuing, playing cards, decorating the Christmas tree — and the actors establish the activity, the ch…
The Five Rs
A thirty-minute resilience reflection in five moves. Retreat: write down, in detail, a view that challenged or puzzled you. Reflect: examine why it confronted you and what value…
The Hitchhiker
Four chairs arranged as a car and four actors. One is a hitchhiker who brings a feeling into the car, and it infects the other passengers. After a while the driver gets out for…
The Hot Chair
Everyone sits in a ring with one chair spare. The leader reads statements and each person takes a personal position: those who agree change seats calmly, those who disagree stay…
The Hot Seat
One person sits on a chair. The others approach one after another saying things like 'Look! Totte has come back!' or 'Ulf, have we forgotten anyone for your 50th birthday next m…
The Letter
Worked alone, as a study in status shift. The circumstances are fixed: you are in your flat waiting for an important letter, you hear the post arrive, fetch it, sort it, find th…
The Magnet
In pairs, one player holds a still shape while the other, eyes closed, explores it by touch and then tries to become the same shape themselves.
The Map
The room becomes a world map — the leader points out north, south, east and west — and people stand where they were born. The page's own guidance is the substance: the host coun…
The Marriage War
Two lines face each other as if for a tug of war, and the front person of each line plays one half of a worn-out marriage: one cooked a special dinner that went cold hours ago,…
The Opened Letter
Two siblings: A lives in B's flat and keeps opening B's post. B comes home, finds a letter already opened, and the scene runs first as denial. Then it is replayed with A admitti…
The Traffic Light
Two groups wait at opposite sides of a wide crossing with traffic lights, a third group watching. On somebody's silent impulse everyone begins to walk and they meet in the middl…
Three-Party Conversation
Three roles in one conversation: someone who brings information, someone who says yes to everything, and someone who blocks everything. The source gives it in six words and leav…
Through the Wrong Door
Walk in through a door as if you had come through the wrong one by mistake. How do you react, how do you leave? Is the reaction natural or is the entrance contrived? The source'…
Trading Faces
In silence, imagine seeing your own face, words and movements from where your partner sits — then say 'I must seem…' and describe it, for a few minutes, before the partner answe…
Travelling Concepts
Duos take one concept — resilience, energy, sustainability — and trace how it travels between their disciplines, watching its meaning shift en route. Interdisciplinary conversat…
Using a stimulus
A bank of what-if situations to drop an existing character into — the bus leaves without them, their wallet vanishes at a festival, they record a video explaining why they acted…
What, So What, Now What? (W³)
A debrief ladder in three deliberate rungs: first only facts and observations (What?), then meaning, patterns and implications (So What?), and only then action (Now What?). Smal…
Yes, No, Maybe
Three signs are put up — yes, no, maybe. The leader reads a statement and everyone stands beside the sign that matches their view, discusses it with the others there, and then s…