Awkward Situations
Practising the creation of painfully awkward situations: how do you draw the uncomfortable atmosphere out in time and space? Practise both putting yourself into awkward situatio…
Acting A5
Resilience
Navigating adversity with agility, staying engaged, and persevering even when progress is slow or uncertain.
Tools for this skill (15)
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…
Embracing Uncertainty
Through mapping, discussion, and metaphor drawing, groups engage both cognitively and emotionally with the dimensions of uncertainty — ambiguity, complexity, unpredictability —…
Fostering Resilience
Participants share real setback experiences and the strategies that got them through — first alone in writing, then in pairs, then harvested with the group — building both a per…
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…
Insults
Two groups each write a list of insults. Then pairs play a plain shop scene — buying and selling, nothing else — and run it again adding an insult to the end of every line, and…
Learning from setbacks rather than being defeated by them
Setbacks are inevitable. The question is whether they defeat the team or become opportunities for learning. When setbacks occur, create structured opportunities to learn from th…
Maintaining momentum through difficulty
Difficult periods can stall team momentum. Resilient teams maintain momentum even through difficulty. During difficult periods, focus on maintaining forward motion: • Identify s…
Overwhelm versus Overload
Distinguishes overload — too much to do, a scheduling problem — from overwhelm, which is a state one is in and cannot schedule away. Participants learn to tell which they are in…
Recovering and rebuilding after significant setbacks
Some setbacks are significant enough that maintaining momentum is not possible. Resilient teams can recover and rebuild. After significant setbacks, allow time for processing. M…
The Disrupters
Two people play a scene and two more disrupt it. Once the scene is well established, one or two troublemakers come on and keep trying to knock the players out of their flow with…
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 Persistence Renewal
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Resilience (VCoL collection): When you feel like giving up, pause. Acknowledge the fatigue or discouragement. Then consciously reconnect…
The Perspective Shift
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Resilience (VCoL collection): When a setback feels overwhelming, pause and zoom out. Ask: 'How will this look in a week? In a year? In t…
The Recovery Moment
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Resilience (VCoL collection): After a difficult moment, pause before moving on. Acknowledge what happened and how it affected you. Take…
Also develops it (36)
Adapting Response Patterns
Using Albert Ellis's ABC model (Activating event – Belief – Consequence), participants analyse their own automatic, self-sabotaging reactions under pressure, identify the unhelp…
After-action reviews
To extract learning from completed projects while experience is still fresh. Following completion of a project or significant event, gather involved team members. Address four q…
Appreciative framing in team discourse
To balance attention to problems with attention to what is working. When discussing team performance or reviewing work, deliberately include appreciative questions alongside pro…
Authentic Goodbye
One person lies on the floor, still and eyes closed, standing in for a relationship or a part of the other person that has ended; the other says what they are letting go of and…
Biopsychosocial Model
Maps how external influences and internal factors together shape the day-to-day self — body, mind and social context taken as one system rather than three competing explanations…
Bobsledding Bodies
Teams of four to six sit in a line, legs wrapped around the person in front, and race to a marked line using only their hands to push along the floor. A team that comes apart ha…
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.…
Celebrating progress and successes
Hope is sustained by evidence that progress is possible. Teams that notice and celebrate progress build the foundation for continued hope. Create regular practices for noticing…
Complain Game
Two minutes complaining about something in your life you want different — as a bad mood, or all-out as a victim — then, after swapping, speak to your usual self in the voice of…
Connecting to larger purpose and movement
Hope is sustained by connection to something larger than immediate circumstances. Regularly connect the team's work to larger context: • How does what the team does contribute t…
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…
Critical Uncertainties
Fast scenario planning: the group picks its two most critical and most uncertain factors, crosses them into four plausible futures, and small groups develop a strategy for opera…
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…
Grief Walking
A structured way for a community to accompany loss or hard transition: people move between four stations — each holding a different mode of being with grief (solitude, witnessin…
Knee Tag
In pairs on the floor facing each other, each person uses one hand to tag and the other to defend, trying to touch their partner's knees.
Letting Go
Marked optional in the handbook, and the deepest thing in it. The framing is explicit: many participants have experienced significant pain and sometimes trauma, and carrying it…
Long-term scenario exploration
To develop capacity to think about alternative futures. Periodically spend time exploring alternative future scenarios: 1. Identify key uncertainties that affect your work—marke…
Loser Ball
A ball is thrown to a named person, who is required to fail to catch it — and the group's job is to find something genuinely praiseworthy in how they failed. 'Good move!', 'Grea…
Maintaining perspective through difficulty
Difficult periods are inevitable. For teams working in awareness of climate and political crises, the broader context itself can be a source of ongoing difficulty. When facing d…
Milestone celebrations and pausing to appreciate
To mark achievements and counteract the tendency to rush past accomplishments. When the team completes a significant project, reaches a goal, or navigates a difficult period suc…
Mind Your Tail
Everyone tucks a length of string into the back of their waistband and moves around the room trying to snatch as many other people's strings as they can, tucking each one they t…
Mountain Meditation
A guided visualization of yourself as a mountain: grounded, dignified, unmoved in essence while weather and seasons — moods, pressures, crises — pass across your slopes. A stabi…
Navigating Uncertainty
A structured critical-thinking approach for deciding under uncertainty, built on evidence-based practice: groups work a complex decision through explicit steps — what is known,…
Noticing and responding to struggles
To ensure that when team members are struggling, the team notices and responds supportively. Create practices that help the team stay attuned to member wellbeing: • Check-ins th…
Positive Reframing
Participants take real negative framings — of the crisis, the project, the team's chances — and rework them into honest positive ones, testing the difference in energy and optio…
Progress Celebration
Sustainability transformation is long-term work. Noticing progress helps teams maintain engagement and find genuine sources of hope without falling into denial. When to use: Whe…
Progressive assumption testing
To test critical assumptions before committing fully to a plan. When facing a significant decision: 1. Identify the 2-3 most critical assumptions (15 min). What has to be true f…
RAIN Meditation
A four-step mindfulness practice for meeting difficult emotion where it stands: Recognize what is happening, Allow it to be here, Investigate with gentle curiosity (in the body,…
Sigh Deeply
Lying comfortably on the back, everyone breathes slowly and sighs deeply three times, letting physical tension leave on each out-breath. After the third sigh the slow deep breat…
Smart Fellas
A counting game in which the phrase changes on threes and multiples of three — 'one smart fella he felt smart', '3 smart fellas they all felt smart' — and any error puts you out…
Storytelling about lessons learned
To build a team culture that values learning through stories. Integrate brief storytelling moments into regular team meetings. One person shares a 'learning moment' from recent…
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…
Tension and Release
Teaching the muscles what relaxed feels like by tensing first and then letting go, noticing the difference. Hands clenched as hard as you can, held seven seconds, released, rest…
Thanks, or Continue?
At regular intervals the improvised performance is stopped and the audience is asked whether they want it to go on: 'thanks, or continue?' If they want more they say continue; i…
Unconditional Forgiveness Practice
A guided reflective process for releasing a held grievance — not excusing the deed, not requiring reconciliation, but freeing the forgiver from carrying it: recalling the hurt a…
WOOP
A four-step, minutes-long goal practice with an unusually strong evidence base: name a Wish (challenging but feasible), vividly imagine the best Outcome, then — the counterintui…