All tools

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A silent meditation facing a partner: first on everything you share — a world, emotions, that they could be a mirror — and a minute or two on what it is like to be one; then on the other as a strange universe, never f…

"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 typically make decisions? Is that working well…

1-2-4-All

A participation structure that lets everyone contribute to a question in ~12–20 minutes: one minute of silent reflection alone, two minutes in pairs, four minutes in foursomes, then each foursome shares one standout i…

10 Fingers

Everyone holds up ten fingers and takes turns making a yes/no statement about themselves — 'I have a cat', 'I have never stolen anything'. Anyone who cannot answer yes drops a finger. What the group learns about each…

15% Solutions

Each person answers: "what is your 15 percent — where do you have discretion and freedom to act on this challenge right now, without more resources or authority?" Lists are shared and sharpened in small groups. Moves…

25/10 Crowd Sourcing

The whole room generates bold ideas on cards ("if you were ten times bolder…"), then mills and swaps cards while scoring each passing idea 1–5 over five rounds. Scores add to 25 max; the top ten ideas surface with no…

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, size and shape carrying meaning. The sculpt…

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 1 (current reality), sensing, then letti…

9 Whys

Pairs interview each other about their work on a shared challenge, asking "why is that important to you?" again and again — up to nine times — until the answer reaches bedrock purpose. Insights consolidate through qua…

A Pen, a Paper

Sitting in a ring, a pen is passed to the left with a fixed exchange — 'here you are', 'what is it?', 'a pen', 'thank you' — but each new passer has forgotten what it is and must ask back down the line, so the questio…

Acting Everyday Chores

Everyone walks the room and the leader calls out a domain — morning routine, schoolwork, a winter activity, a holiday, a TV evening, the big shop, clothes shopping, cleaning — and each person plays their own reading o…

Acting in Alignment

Participants surface and rank their core values through imagination and ordering tasks, then examine honestly where recent actions expressed or contradicted them, and commit to one concrete value-reflecting change. So…

Action Syllables

Each person says their name one syllable at a time, giving every syllable its own gesture, and the group repeats it back. Each new person adds theirs and the group then runs the whole accumulated sequence from the sta…

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 everything the active player offers. The sour…

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 give everyone a turn to speak • Written…

Active Listening

The foundational listening exercise in its many dressings: in pairs, one person speaks about something real while the listener gives full attention — no interrupting, no advising — then reflects back what they heard,…

Acts of Kindness in Daily Life

The behavioural wing of compassion training: deliberately practising generosity, hospitality or kindness toward specific people — someone close, someone neutral, someone difficult — and toward the wider world (volunta…

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 unhelpful beliefs driving them, and design and…

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 rejection, abandonment, betrayal, loss o…

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 for working together. This might include s…

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 each actor their own adjective, held for…

Adventure Walk

The leader tells a story that everyone acts out individually and simultaneously: packing a rucksack, hanging it on your back, climbing out of the window, dropping to the ground, running silently over the grass, climbi…

Advice

Two minutes on something in your life you want to be different, then your partner asks the one question that changes everything: 'do you want advice?' Yes gets a minute of advice; no gets an offer of care — a shoulder…

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 over. The source is firm that people shou…

Affirm the Denial

Whatever one person claims, the other denies — and then the first has to affirm the denial while keeping their original claim alive. 'I'm getting married!' 'No you're not, you're already married.' 'Yes, but I'm gettin…

African Massage

In threes, two people work on the third, who stands bent forward with head and arms hanging. The two tap with cupped hands from the shoulders down the back, harder over the glutes, then down the legs, finishing with l…

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 questions: 1. What did we intend to accom…

Agency and Communion

Groups of four or five each design a gift for the whole room — an experience, an appreciation, anything — by first saying what each wants people to feel, then brainstorming with 'yes, and' only, then choosing somethin…

Agreement & Certainty Matrix

Groups sort their challenges onto a 2×2: how much do we agree about what to do, and how certain are we about cause and effect? Simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic work each get matched to fitting approaches — en…

Alliteration Introduction

Each person introduces themselves with an alliterating adjective and a gesture — 'I'm Wonderful Wendy' — and each new player repeats everyone before them before adding their own. The first player ends up having to per…

Alphabet Circle

One person says the first letter of the alphabet to anyone else in the circle, who says the next letter to somebody else, and so on all the way to the end. Then try to get through the alphabet as fast as possible, and…

Alphabet Letters

In groups of four or five, a letter is called and each group forms it with their bodies. That is the whole game — fast, physical, and requiring a group to negotiate shape without much time to talk.

Ambulance Tag

One person is 'the accident' and may only move along an invisible straight line dividing the room. Everyone else tries to cross from one side to the other. Get run over and you fall and play injured — and to be rescue…

Analyzing and addressing power dynamics in collaboration

Power dynamics inevitably shape collaboration. Unexamined dynamics can make 'collaboration' into disguised hierarchy. Before significant collaborative work (especially with external partners), map the power landscape:…

Anatomy of a Good Climate Story

A template for building a reusable climate story: choose a topic that meets your audience where they are; draft the story at 400, 200 and 100 words so you can tell it confidently anywhere; structure it with Denise Bad…

Angel Walk

Slow music, a darkened room, two lines facing each other; one person at a time walks slowly between them with eyes closed while everyone touches and guides them through, perhaps whispering appreciation, and is receive…

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 listeners most. The manual recommends it…

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 character is built on a different animal. The…

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, embodying it, and passes the basket on…

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 should be aware of? • What trends are de…

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 asks 'anybody else?', and everyone for whom…

Anyone who...

The group sits in a circle of chairs with one person standing in the middle, who calls out something they might have in common with others — 'anyone who has a dog'. Everyone it is true of has to move to a different ch…

Apology Process

Connect with a meaningful apology you have not given, or cannot, and give it to a listener through stems the facilitator reads aloud — 'I acknowledge that I hurt you when I…', 'when you held me accountable, I felt…',…

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 next person goes.

Appreciation Dyads

Five minutes of 'being with you, I appreciate…' — about yourself, the other, or both, in the present moment — then swap. People run dry after a couple of minutes, the manual notes, and the digging for something new is…

Appreciation Hot Seat

A volunteer takes the seat and everyone else says what they appreciate — things experienced in them, or intuited — while the person occasionally rates, one to five, how hot it is to hear. Five to ten minutes each. 'Su…

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 problem-focused ones: • Before discussing w…

Appreciative Interviews

In pairs, people interview each other for a success story — a time they worked on a challenge and are proud of what happened — then quartets distill the conditions that made success possible and the whole group harves…

Articulating and co-developing shared purpose

Mobilization requires compelling purpose that others can connect to. Purpose becomes even more powerful when co-developed. Develop clear articulation of the team's purpose: what you are trying to accomplish, why it ma…

Asking For Support

Say what you are struggling with; close your eyes and feel for the unmet need under it — significance, love, certainty — and for one concrete thing the other person could do; then ask, in the stem 'I'm feeling…; would…

At the Cinema

Lying or sitting in dimmed light, participants hear four short pieces of music and imagine a film to them — its opening and characters, its plot and genre, its turning point, its ending — with a little time between pi…

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 completes the stems — what I will miss,…

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 situations and putting others into them.

B.G.D.V.F. Connection

Two people share, in order, a brag, a gratitude, a desire, a vulnerability and a fear from the day or the time since they last met, each with its own sentence stem. Written by a partner who found that doing it nightly…

Back Dancing

In pairs, standing back to back, players dance to changing music without ever losing contact between their backs. Nobody can see their partner, so the whole negotiation happens through weight and pressure.

Bacon

Angels, Recipients and Free Agents. The Angels work out what essential nutrient a Recipient is short of right now — the thing keeping them from their whole brilliance — and then spend twenty minutes making it happen,…

Ball Cooperation Tag

Two taggers share a soft ball and may pass it between them, but whoever holds it cannot take a step — so catching anyone requires passing to a better-placed partner. Everyone caught joins the taggers, and the passing…

Ball Massage

In pairs, one person lies on their front and the other rolls a ball over their back. The leader can guide it aloud — start between the shoulder blades, then a little harder over the shoulders — with music underneath.

Ball Tag

One player has a soft ball to throw at the others; anyone may pick it up and throw, so there is no fixed chaser. Being hit puts you out at the side — until the person who hit you is hit themselves, which brings you ba…

Bandaid Tag

A tag game where each tag has to be held: you cover the spot you were tagged with a hand, and a second tag takes your other hand. A third freezes you, until two other players come and 'operate' by tagging you simultan…

Be a Part

One person goes up and acts as a part of something that moves — a machine, an organism, a process. As soon as anyone else works out what whole that part belongs to, they join as another part of it. Movement, sound and…

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 right, they name what they are stepping out…

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 first person — and/or write the water a than…

Being Grateful

An introduction to gratitude practice: noticing and naming what is already present and good — in writing, jars, or rounds — shifting attention from scarcity to appreciation, with the follow-on invitation to make it a…

Being Proactive

A short talk and two sorting exercises on the difference between acting and being acted upon. The handbook defines proactive as taking responsibility for your life, choices and future — "who I am today and what I beco…

Best Friends / Mortal Enemies

Everyone secretly picks a 'best friend' and, on three, gets as close to them as possible; then a 'mortal enemy', and gets as far away as possible; then tries to keep the friend between themselves and the enemy. Chaos,…

Bibberi Bibberi Bo

Everyone stands in a ring around one person, who turns to somebody, points, and says 'bibberi bibberi bo'; if the person pointed at cannot get their 'bo' in first, they swap. Then the middle person may say just 'bo',…

Big and Small Fish

The group stands in a circle passing a fish around. Saying 'big fish' with the hands held close together passes it on; saying 'small fish' with the hands held far apart reverses the direction. Keeping track of which i…

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. Sits in the guide between naming your…

Björn Kellman

Teams of three or four are given a country and a year by the audience, take up to thirty seconds to confer, and then perform that country's invented Eurovision entry for that year — tune, lyric and choreography that f…

Blind Association Ring

Standing in a ring, everyone takes turns saying a word that associates to the one their neighbour just said. On the leader's word everyone closes their eyes and keeps going; then the ring dissolves and people walk the…

Blind Dance

Half the group stands scattered with their eyes closed. Music starts and the other half each go to someone and dance them around, while the dancer keeps their eyes shut throughout. Partners change three times; at the…

Blind Desire

Eyes closed, attend to sensation, then to what the body wants, and let it move — first in place, then through the room, moving away from any contact and following your own pleasure; then, after a few minutes, making c…

Blind Lead

One person is blindfolded in a room that has been deliberately strewn with obstacles, and the rest of the group has to talk them across it. The source records a fuller variant it calls Airplane, where a single control…

Blind Line Up

The group has to sort itself into an order — by height, by birthday — with everyone's eyes closed and nobody allowed to speak. Whatever strategy emerges has to emerge through touch and patience.

Blind Statue

Everyone closes their eyes and the group builds a single statue together — a 'glittering emerald', say. When it is finished and everyone has found a position, they open their eyes and see what they made.

Blindfolded Scene

Players perform an improvised scene blindfolded, so every offer has to be heard rather than seen. The source also records a variation with mousetraps on the stage and players barefoot, which it introduces with 'not ve…

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' instead — and whoever hears it counts silen…

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 has to reassemble before continuing.

Body Awareness

Across multiple sessions, participants train attention to their bodily and affective responses inside real learning and work situations — where concentration lives, how tension shapes communication, what the body know…

Body Dialogue

Movement first — fifteen minutes of dance or active play with music, enough to raise the heart rate — then participants lie down, still breathing hard, and hold a conversation with their own body. The curriculum uses…

Body Hide

Four players try to hide a fifth using nothing but their own bodies while everyone else looks for any visible patch of clothing, shoe or skin. Each round removes a hider, until the group works out that a wall or a cor…

Body Love

Three minutes appreciating three parts of your own body aloud, one minute to set any boundaries — 'don't speak about my stomach, arms or breasts' — and then your partner appreciates three parts of you, slowly, checkin…

Body Part Leads

The leader names a body part that will lead the person around the room, and the group works with direction, strength, tempo, level and form. What does the leading part look like? What does it do to the rest of the bod…

Body Scan Meditation

A guided practice of moving attention slowly and systematically through the body, noticing sensation without trying to change it. Usually done lying down with audio guidance, 20–45 minutes. The foundational formal pra…

Bomb and shield

Each person silently picks two others — one their 'bomb', one their 'shield' — and then keeps moving so the shield stays between them and the bomb. Nobody knows who chose whom, so the whole room ends up in continuous…

Boris

An interrogation room: an interrogator, a suspect, sometimes a secretary — and Boris. Boris is a horrible figure, a monster or a giant, and is not played by any actor at all. He exists only in how the others behave ab…

Brainstorming with Eureka

A structured brainstorm in explicit ideation and narrowing phases: teams break a complex problem down, generate freely on cards, then converge on a simple narrative, idea, or solution. Ordinary brainstorming with the…

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 a breakthrough that strengthens commitme…

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: • Respond constructively when people tak…

Building and maintaining relationships across team boundaries

The quality of external relationships significantly affects the team's ability to accomplish its goals. Start by mapping the team's key external relationships. Which other teams do you depend on or who depend on you?…

Building capability for co-creation with external actors

Co-creating with external actors involves challenges beyond internal collaboration. Before significant external co-creation, clarify the nature of the collaboration. Is this genuinely shared creation? Or is it consult…

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 is valued • Distinguish between challen…

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 yet considered? What would this decisio…

Building Psychological Safety

Sustainability work requires speaking uncomfortable truths, acknowledging uncertainty, and challenging unsustainable practices. None of this is possible without psychological safety—the shared belief that the team is…

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 only speak through the radio. The manual…

Bumpity Bump

Everyone learns the names of the two people beside them. The person in the middle points at someone and says 'bumpity bump bump bump'; before they finish, the person pointed at has to name both neighbours. Fail and yo…

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. Develop team practices for evaluating an…

Call the Wrong Name

Everyone pairs up in a ring except one person, who stands alone. When that person calls a name, it is not the named person who must run to them — it is the named person's partner. The named one may try to hold their p…

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 generations, distant people, and non-hum…

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, going for breadth rather than depth. Then…

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 three minutes of stillness, then mirrors b…

Catch the Audience With Your Story

A five-step structure for building a scene fast: A defines a place by mime in under ten seconds; B adds a relationship and a status through a short action; A says out loud what the problem is; B raises the stakes by m…

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 and celebrating progress: • Beginning me…

Celebrity Interview

A leader or expert is interviewed talk-show style with questions that reach for the person behind the role — struggles, doubts, stories — while pairs in the audience formulate follow-up questions on cards. Reconnects…

Chair Rhythm

Five players share a single chair, arranging themselves into one composed image, and each is given a number. The rest of the group circles them; when the leader calls a number, everyone takes on that person's posture…

Challenge your Beliefs

Participants surface limiting beliefs about change — "I have no influence anyway" — and actively transform them into empowering ones, working collectively and in pairs on how such beliefs constrain what people even at…

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, charged story is changed into what you wish…

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 middle goat's — and work out where it now sta…

Changing Emotion

In threes or fours, each person takes a starting emotion and holds a conversation in which only the numbers one to ten may be spoken, so the feeling has to carry entirely in the voice. During the conversation everyone…

Changing Statue

In groups of four or five, numbered so the order holds, one person makes a statue and each next person connects to it until everyone is in. Then number one steps out, looks at what is there, finds a new place and a ne…

Choose Your Own Adventure

One person shares what is on their heart for two minutes; the other two each name the thread that most has their attention — something said, or a way of being — and the speaker picks one and follows it. Two rounds at…

Circle of Influence

A reflection exercise from Covey's Habit 1 (Be Proactive): list current concerns, then sort them into the Circle of Concern (things you worry about) versus the Circle of Influence (things you can affect). Notice where…

Circle Sitting

The circle turns a quarter left, closes up until everyone is touching, and sits down at once — each person landing on the knees of the person behind them, so the whole ring holds itself up. Done well it can even walk.

Circling

A conversation about what is actually happening for you and between you, right now — sensations, emotions, relationship, 'vibes' — with curiosity about others' experience and none of the usual stories or advice. A Liv…

Clap the Body Awake

Standing with a bit of room and feet apart for balance, everyone claps their own body awake with an open hand: from the fingers up to the shoulder and back down, both sides of the arm, then the other arm; from the toe…

Clearness Committee

The Quaker discernment practice: a focus person brings an important question or decision; a committee of four or five holds them for three-quarters of an hour with ONLY honest, open questions — no advice, no stories,…

Click Bang you`re dead

A guessing game with a hidden rule: the leader points around the circle saying 'click' or 'bang' in a way that suggests a pattern, then declares someone dead. The secret is that it is whoever speaks first after the po…

Climate Circles / Climate Cafés

Hosted talking circles where participants voluntarily share what the climate crisis stirs in them — fear, anger, guilt, hope — in a confidential, non-judgmental space with no fixing and no debate. The host holds struc…

Climate Emotions Wheel

A color wheel of climate-related emotions (anger, fear, sadness, positivity and their finer shades) used as a check-in and vocabulary tool: participants locate and name what they feel about the climate crisis, normali…

Clothes Check

A two-session investigation of one's own wardrobe: count what you own and how often it's worn; take your most- and least-worn pieces and research their materials, brands, and countries of origin; map the origins with…

Co-creation Prompt

Co-creation builds shared ownership of sustainability initiatives. When people contribute to solutions, they are more committed to implementing them. When to use: When planning sustainability initiatives, when ideas f…

Co-Designing Transition Experiments

With a printable card deck and practical guidelines, teams co-design transition experiments — innovation projects that start from a societal challenge and treat learning as the core strategy — from framing through exp…

Coaching with Compassion

An approach to coaching political leaders that starts from care rather than correction: build a learning agenda toward the client's ideal self, treat change as a learning process, avoid 'ought' and shaming narratives,…

Cognitive Defusion Practice

The core ACT move of stepping back from a thought so it becomes something you HAVE rather than something you ARE: rephrasing "I don't matter to anyone" as "I am having the thought that I don't matter to anyone", obser…

Cognitive Reframing — Negative to Positive

A discussion and practice on shifting attention from what is wrong to what is wanted, framed as a choice available in any moment rather than a personality trait. Concrete techniques are taught: milder wording in place…

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 factors—what are the main things that af…

Collaborative working sessions

Most team meetings are for coordination. Teams need dedicated time for actually creating together. Create working sessions specifically designed for collaborative creation. The goal is not to discuss or decide but to…

Color Echo

One partner says items in a category — colours, numbers, emotions — and the other echoes each back in any way they like; then swap; then either may start. Simple, the manual says, and it has kicked its author into dee…

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 wherever it goes. Roles swap after a fe…

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. Different teams, departments, and organizations…

Community Appreciations

Standing in a circle, a sub-group is named — facilitators, men, women, 'people who attend every damn event' — and steps into the middle, and three to five people appreciate a member or the group for what they brought.…

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 conversations. When issues need to be addressed, d…

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 your higher or most resourceful self: '(…

Compliment Tag

Whoever is caught freezes as a statue and can only be released by someone walking up and paying them a compliment. The sheet suggests starting by working out together what compliments the group might use.

Conductor

A tight circle becomes three choirs; whoever stands in the middle improvises a melody — words, gibberish, a single note — for each choir to loop, then conducts the layers until ending it. Anyone may take the middle. T…

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 the facilitator, as Voice of God, notes…

Connectedness in decision-making

To ensure that awareness of connections informs actual decisions. When facing significant decisions, include explicit consideration of connections: • How does this decision affect those we are connected to—stakeholder…

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 to broader organizational goals? • How do…

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, and the Earth as a primary stakeholder —…

Connection to Impact

Genuine care for affected communities and ecosystems drives more authentic sustainability efforts than compliance alone. This practice strengthens felt connection to those impacted by company operations. When to use:…

Connections Web

Sustainability challenges are interconnected. Systems thinking helps teams see how actions in one area affect others, preventing solutions that create new problems. When to use: When planning sustainability initiative…

Conscious Consumption Quest

Participants investigate the global supply chains behind everyday products — tracing materials, labor, and impacts across the world — and confront what their own consumption patterns connect them to, ending with what…

Constellations

In a large circle, on each prompt everyone finds the one person for whom it is most true — the person you respect most, feel least connected to, would most like to work with, have a withhold for, are most attracted to…

Constellations of Concern

Someone names a context alive in the room — age disparity, political difference, that everyone here could afford this event, or 'I'm aware of my age' — and people move closer to or further from the speaker by how much…

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 flattening the other's, and noticing the…

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, not individuals • Assume good intention…

Container Building

The facilitator's meta-practice from Theory U: deliberately creating the holding space before the work — preparing one's own inner condition, co-creating ground rules, and inviting open mind, heart, and will — so that…

Context Conversation

A conversation held entirely in the stem 'Right now, I would ___ because ___' — the thing you would do, and the motive under it, which can go several 'because's down: 'I would ask you a question, because I feel nervou…

Contexter

After a short grounding meditation, the group completes the stem 'What's happening right now is…' popcorn-style, with no rebuttals, while the facilitator occasionally asks where the 'dropped in' feeling has gone. Buil…

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 conversation round, and a closing round of takeaway…

Coordination across team boundaries

Most significant work requires coordination across team boundaries. Effective coordination multiplies the team's impact. Identify where cross-boundary coordination is needed: which other teams, functions, or organizat…

Copy Circle

One at a time, each person steps into the middle of the circle with a big movement and a loud sound, then steps back — and everyone else steps in and copies both. Two variants change the transmission: passing a new mo…

Core Exploration

In threes, an Explorer spends three minutes going after what matters most to a Speaker — feeling it, reflecting it, digging with 'why does X matter to you?', distilling and checking — while a Listener tracks where the…

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 it. Played in twos; swap status, or cha…

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 playing them. Then small groups stage meeting…

Council (Circle with Talking Piece)

A circle process with a talking piece: only the holder speaks, everyone else practices devoted listening. Guidelines — speak from the heart, listen from the heart, be spontaneous and lean, speak stories rather than ab…

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 being — voicing what the humans cannot hear…

Count to 20

The group tries to count to twenty out loud with no order agreed and nobody leading. Anyone may say the next number; if two people speak at once the count restarts at one. Getting there takes listening for when not to…

Counting one, two, three

In pairs, people alternate counting one, two, three until it has a rhythm, then replace 'one' with a clap or a stamp, then 'two', then 'three', until the count is entirely gesture. Simple to describe and hard to hold,…

Courage Prompt

Sustainability work often requires courage—to speak up, to challenge unsustainable practices, to maintain commitments under pressure. This practice helps identify what responsible courage looks like. When to use: When…

Create Obstacles

Two players chase each other around the room; the one being chased mimes obstacles into existence and the chaser has to get over, under or through each of them before continuing.

Creating genuinely inclusive engagement with external actors

To model inclusive practice in how the team reaches out and collaborates. When planning engagement with external actors, consider who is being included and who might be left out. Whose voices are typically heard? Whos…

Creating New Metaphors

Groups examine the entrenched metaphors framing a complex issue (war on drugs, race to the top, footprint) and invent new metaphors that open different perspectives and options — testing how much of what seems like re…

Creating norms that welcome vulnerability

To reduce pressure toward conformity and create space for authenticity. Cultivate norms that make it safe to be authentic: • The team leader regularly models vulnerability by admitting uncertainty and acknowledging mi…

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 expected, not just permitted. Make clear that…

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: • Productive failure: trying something reasona…

Creating unconditional space for emergence

To create opportunities to explore without pressure to reach conclusions. Periodically create protected time for a different quality of conversation: • No agenda or predetermined outcome • No requirement to solve anyt…

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 everything on it they currently do in any fo…

Critical Thinking Deep Dive

Sustainability challenges often come with strong opinions and pressure to act fast. Critical thinking helps teams slow down, examine assumptions, and make more responsible decisions. When to use: When sustainability i…

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 operating in each quadrant — then compare, lo…

Cross Circle

Someone calls another player's name and immediately starts walking toward them. Before they arrive, that person must call a third name and set off themselves, freeing their place. Nobody can stand still, and the circl…

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 another team or department to share how t…

Crowdsource Meditation

Everyone closes their eyes and, whenever moved, names aloud what they are aware of — sweating hands, nerves, a deep breath. Others' noticings may shift your own or not; either is fine. A group meditation guided by the…

Cultivating a mindful relationship to consumption and resources

Beyond specific practices lies a deeper question about orientation—the team's fundamental relationship to consumption and resources. Create periodic opportunities to reflect on the team's relationship to resources: Ex…

Cultivating Awe

A solo imagination-and-reflection journey designed to evoke awe — vastness, wonder, the sense of something larger than oneself — and then harvest what it shifts: meaning, appreciation, and felt connection. Runs as ind…

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 work their own cultural defaults and whe…

Cultural Dimensions Reflection

A structured group reflection for interculturally mixed teams: learn the main dimensions along which working cultures differ (power distance, individualism/collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, communication directness…

Curiosity

Five minutes of asking a partner only what you are genuinely curious about, which they may answer or decline; a minute of feedback on the questions; three more minutes; then the asker gives three stems as a gift — fir…

Daily-to-long-term connection practices

To maintain a thread between daily work and longer-term goals. Integrate brief long-term references into regular team meetings: • Occasionally ask: 'How does this relate to where we're trying to go over the next year?…

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 ring and it is free for somebody else.

Dance Warm-Up

Everyone spreads out with room to move to driving music, and the leader names body parts that are to dance — either swapping one for the next, or accumulating them until the whole body is going.

Dance with Eyes Closed

Half the group stands with eyes closed at one side of the room; the others each invite one of them to dance. The sheet puts the responsibility plainly: the person who invites is responsible for their partner's experie…

Dance with Impulses

In groups of three to five, moving together to music, participants are told to give and take impulses from each other — copying, or drawing inspiration from, one another's movements, and taking turns at doing so.

Dancing in Levels

In threes, to music, the group moves together with one person working high — reaching upward — one at middle level with bent knees and back, and one on the floor. At any point somebody can change level, and whoever wa…

Dancing in the Dark

Everyone takes their own space in the room, the lights go out, soft music plays, and people move however they like. The sheet's reasoning is the point: with the lights fully off nobody feels looked at, which is what l…

Death and Retriever

A version of Scorpion in which the dead can be brought back. Everyone moves with eyes closed; a killer kills by touch and victims scream and freeze, while a retriever wearing a scarf revives them by rubbing them with…

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 time, explore questions like: • What wo…

Dedicated time for relationship-building

Relationships develop through interaction, and interaction requires time. For internal relationships: Informal gatherings provide low-pressure opportunities to know each other beyond work roles. These should be genuin…

Deep Democracy (Facilitated Group Process)

Facilitation approach built on the premise that the minority voice carries information the group needs: decisions are made only after the "no" has been genuinely heard, dissent is amplified rather than smoothed over,…

Deep Listening

Listening past the words: in pairs or small groups, the listener holds complete, non-judgmental attention — without inner censorship, rehearsing a reply, or steering — staying open to what is beneath what is said, in…

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 teams to share their expertise or perspecti…

Design StoryBoards

Meeting design as explicit craft: before an important session, sketch its arc frame by frame — purpose, participants, and which structure fills each block of time — the way filmmakers storyboard scenes. A meta-tool th…

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. This person's job is to identify weaknesses…

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 solidarity out of what is usually carried a…

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 (evolving, learning), embedded in CONTEXT (or…

Dialogue Interview

A prepared but generative one-to-one conversation (30–90 minutes) designed to open reflection rather than extract answers: the interviewer sets an inner container in silence beforehand, asks biographical and meaning-o…

Different Places, Different Feelings

The stage is divided into four squares and each is assigned a feeling. For as long as a character stands in a square they carry that square's feeling, so moving changes what they feel. The action then has to make sens…

Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)

A facilitated dialogue built on positive deviance: through seven fixed questions, a group discovers who among them is already solving a chronic problem against the odds, what they do differently, and what the group wi…

Distillation

One person speaks for two minutes to something on their heart; a second reflects back exactly what they heard; the speaker clarifies; a third says what they took from the whole exchange; the speaker sums the heart of…

Distinguish Your Shadow

In a group of four to seven, each person in turn introduces their shadow — the part they hide or are ashamed of — and answers the group's questions as that part: how it most likes to be seen, what it does to be seen t…

Don't Laugh

A scene on a very serious subject — death, illness, addiction are the source's examples — and any player who laughs or giggles is replaced by another. A variation turns it around: whoever makes someone in the audience…

Doom Circle

A volunteer asks for feedback on their goals, sets the prompt and the level of gentleness they want, and then receives it from everyone in turn — specific, owned, offered rather than demanded — answering each only wit…

Drawing Together

Participants tell the story of a challenge and their journey through it using only five symbols — circle, rectangle, triangle, spiral, star-person — drawn, not spoken. Drawings are shared and read together. Nonverbal…

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, transformation) they use fluently and which are abse…

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 a source of water and drinks liberally w…

Dyad Circling (Wedding Circle)

Two closely interdependent people — a couple, colleagues — circle each other on a tension between them while four to eight others sit around and attend only to the space between the two, sharing what that does in them…

Ecocycle Planning

The group maps its full portfolio of activities onto the ecocycle — birth, maturity, creative destruction, renewal — and looks for what is stuck in rigidity traps (kept alive too long) or scarcity traps (starved too e…

Elephant, palm tree, jelly

One person in the middle points at somebody and calls elephant, palm tree or jelly; that person and the two either side of them have three seconds to build the shape together. Each shape has a fixed form the group lea…

Embracing Uncertainty

Through mapping, discussion, and metaphor drawing, groups engage both cognitively and emotionally with the dimensions of uncertainty — ambiguity, complexity, unpredictability — and their own responses to each, buildin…

Emotion Sculpture

One person chooses an emotion they struggle with and sculpts their partner into it — shoulders, brows, posture — adjusting like a director until it is right, walks around it, and then speaks to it: with compassion, or…

Emotional Manipulation

A two-player scene opens with a line designed to move the other character's emotional state — a compliment or an insult — and the second player accepts it and lets it land. The source is emphatic that it is the charac…

Emotional Volume Knob

One partner talks; the other conducts with a hand — fist at the hip for stop, pointing forward for go, down for dry and rational, up for pure emotion, anywhere between for that much. A way to play with how we say thin…

Emotions in Numbers

In threes or fours, each person picks an emotion and the group converses using only the numbers one to ten, so nothing but tone, pace and body carries the meaning. The audience listens with eyes closed and afterwards…

Empathy

Silent eye contact, then one person speaks for three minutes to something on their heart while the other only listens; the listener says back exactly what they heard, with as little interpretation as they can; the spe…

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 difference: listening for their world wi…

Enabling Co-Creation

Participants learn to facilitate co-creation sessions themselves: framing a real-life case, designing for inclusion and safety, hosting diverse stakeholders, and reflecting on what their facilitation enabled or blocke…

Ending Appreciations

Round the circle, each person tells the one beside them something they appreciate about them from the last few hours. That is the whole game; the manual only adds to leave extra time for large groups.

Enhancing Sensorial Connectedness

A day with a local ecosystem: participants engage it through their senses — observing, listening, touching, collecting in situ — and reflect on interdependence and appreciation of the natural world, alternating solo i…

Ensuring diverse perspectives shape decisions

Inclusion is not merely about participation but about influence. Diverse perspectives must actually shape decisions. Examine how decisions actually get made. Who has voice in significant choices? Whose perspectives ar…

Envisioning a Sustainable Future

A guided visualisation, adapted from Donella Meadows' visioning work, for imagining a sustainable world concretely enough to act from: prepare in a quiet place with paper and pen; visualise home, community, energy, wa…

EPIC Communication

A four-part structure for a persuasive message — Engage, Problem, Inform, Call to action — taught one step at a time, with participants drafting their own on a topic they choose as each step is explained. Built for sp…

Establishing a Clear Vision

A talk-and-discussion that starts from the claim that everyone already holds visions of their life, including negative ones, and acts on them daily — the handbook's example is a widow who believes she will become a be…

Everyday Creative Practice

Choosing one creative activity that gives you relaxation, enjoyment and fun — drawing, music, writing, movement, crafts — practising it regularly, and deliberately exploring where it can cross into your work: where mi…

Everyone Does the Same

Standing in a circle, the group invents three creatures it may become — a cat that claws and miaows, a greaser slapping a double bass, the king greeting his people. On a signal, everyone instantly becomes one of the t…

Exactly One Walks

Everyone stands spread around the room and one person walks. When that person stops, somebody else has to start — exactly one person, immediately. There must be precisely one person walking at any moment, and nobody d…

Examining and reducing the team's environmental footprint

Teams cannot reduce what they do not notice. Creating awareness of environmental footprint is the foundation for responsible resource use. Periodically examine the team's direct environmental footprint. Dimensions to…

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, reducing bias and blind spots by making…

Exclusion

Four to six people play a scene in which one of them is left outside the group — not included in whatever the others are doing. The players have to sense who the group is excluding so that they agree on it without say…

Expanding the system boundary

To extend thinking beyond immediate context to include broader connections. Periodically apply systems thinking to larger questions: Upstream connections: Where do our inputs come from? What systems produce the resour…

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 by side and integrating them into interdi…

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 we rarely think about? • What are their…

Face Massage

Each person massages their own face, sitting comfortably: fingers stroked over the whole face, circles at the chin and cheeks, light pressure at the temples, the forehead and scalp, then drawn outward from the middle…

Facilitation for generative collaboration

Skilled facilitation helps collaborative sessions be generative rather than frustrating. Develop facilitation capability within the team. Key facilitation skills include: • Structuring the process so that all can cont…

Family Photo

About five people step forward and the audience calls out a family theme — the monster family — and the group becomes that family photograph, frozen in a pose — the page's advice is to go with the first impulse and no…

Far Away, So Close

Two lines at opposite ends of the room; one line directs the other with three hand signals — come closer, go back, stop — for a minute or two, in silence, then partners talk and swap. Kept strictly to three signals it…

Feeling Meter

The group sings a song everyone knows — the source's example is Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star — and then sings it again in different feelings, deliberately exaggerated. Half the group can act as the meter, judging how…

Feeling Scenes

The audience suggests feelings — sad, angry, in love — and in the coming scene every actor tries to hold that feeling as fully as they can. A variation gives each actor their own feeling, held for the whole scene or r…

Feng Shui

Sit in a circle and notice how this arrangement feels — connected or not, playful or serious — then share, then change the configuration (standing, one person standing while others sit) and notice again. The manual re…

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 person pauses — or raises a hand and keeps…

Film Posters

A genre and a title are called out — the horror film 'The Witness in the Attic' — and a group of three to five has to become the cinema poster for it, fast, then hold still. Next film.

Finding Your Story of Climate Justice

A writing exercise for connecting yourself to climate justice rather than holding it at arm's length: choose the Global South region and weather event you most relate to, write a story of your feelings and insights, c…

Fingertips

In pairs, all ten fingertips touching, one player closes their eyes and is led around the room by the other — over and under obstacles — with the connection at the fingers the only channel between them.

Five Minutes With Structure

Improvise a short performance of about five minutes with at least three people in it. One person sits out with paper and pen, watches particularly closely, analyses and takes notes. The aim is that the performance sho…

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. The sheet then extends it into rehears…

Flock Dance

The group forms a wedge — one player at the point, two behind, three behind them — and the leader moves while each row copies the row in front. The leader can even turn and face the second row — at which point, as the…

Fly on the Wall

A volunteer chooses mild, medium or spicy, then sits to the side with their back to the group and listens while everyone talks about them as if they were not there — noticings, projections, gossip pitched to the level…

Focus on contribution over credit

To shift team culture toward valuing contribution to shared goals rather than individual recognition. Cultivate norms and practices that emphasize contribution over credit: • When discussing successes, emphasize colla…

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 different perspectives face to face in p…

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 large ones in the room.

Foot Tag

Everyone stands in a ring holding hands. One person tags another by touching their foot with their own, and the touched person becomes the tagger. Letting go of your neighbours' hands is not allowed, so the whole ring…

Foot Touch Tag

Players stand in pairs with feet touching, and each pair swaps names. A stationary 'it' calls a name; the person who now carries that name has to reach them without being tagged by the person whose name it actually is…

Fortune Cookie

Around the circle, each person adds one word to a sentence nobody is composing; the result is the group's fortune, repeated back word by word and honoured with a bow. 'A great ending game for any event', the manual sa…

Fostering Collaborative Creativity

Participants learn to lead brainstorming-centered co-creation themselves: hosting inclusive ideation, protecting wild ideas from early judgment, and steering groups toward breakthrough combinations — facilitation of c…

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 personal repertoire for bouncing back and t…

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 then talks among itself — and if somebody…

Four Leave the Bench

Wordless improvisation. Four people on a bench have to leave it for the same reason.

Four Lines

Groups of four are handed a slip with four lines of dialogue and must stage them — all four, in the given order, with nothing else spoken. Everything else has to be invented around them: who these people are, what the…

Frame

Like the Noticing Game but each statement begins with the word 'Frame', treating the present moment of contact as a still life to be described admiringly in a phrase. Partners alternate for as long as they like; the m…

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 table, and opens by calling the exercise 'n…

Freeze

Two people improvise in the middle of a circle until anyone watching calls 'freeze'. The caller steps in, takes over one performer's exact physical position, and starts a completely different scene from that shape. Th…

Freeze Frame

In a group who know each other, everyone but the receiver secretly chooses a quality they associate with that person and a pose to show it; on three, all strike and hold, then each tells the story behind theirs. A bir…

Frustration Station

Think of someone you struggle to be authentic with — the manual calls them 'the Jerk' and admits some people dislike that — and embody them while your partner tries to relate to them authentically; exchange impact; br…

Future Folktales

Over a multi-session arc, participants craft folktales told FROM a regenerative future — drawing on future visions to build narratives of being, not just technology — and tell them as folktales are told: aloud, shaped…

Future generations perspective

To develop capacity to consider how decisions affect those who come after. When facing significant decisions with lasting consequences, explicitly introduce future stakeholders' perspective: Future employees: How will…

Future Impact Question

Long-term thinking is essential for sustainability. This practice helps teams consider impacts beyond immediate results, strengthening alignment with Agenda 2030 and future generations. When to use: Before decisions w…

Future Search

A structured 2.5–3 day planning conference that gets "the whole system in the room" — 40–80 stakeholders across interests review their common past, map present trends, own their responses, and develop shared future sc…

Future~Present

Small groups gather at an imagined campfire 15–30 years ahead: "elders" recount to "youths" how the work fully succeeded, describing that world as if present, then all look "back" to notice which tactics visible in to…

Generative Relationships STAR

Working groups assess their own interaction pattern on the STAR compass — Separateness (diversity of perspective), Tuning (listening and reflecting), Action (joint activity), and Reason (shared purpose) — first alone,…

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 while the other covers their ears. Tell…

Getting Presents

It is the receiver's birthday and the others shower them with imaginary gifts, fast, one after another; the receiver meets every gift — thoughtful or absurd — with delight and thanks. Four minutes each, then a one-sen…

Gingerbread Tag

Everyone but two forms a ring of linked pairs, each pair leaving one arm crooked and free. One player chases another; the chased can save themselves by hooking onto a free arm, which frees the person on the far side o…

Give the Other Focus

Two people on stage and one of them does not speak. The other has to build, through their own dialogue, the openings that let the silent one act and have something to do. It is practice in making room for somebody els…

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, afraid to brave, certain to uncertain, conf…

Gratitude Journal

Write three things you are truly grateful for right now — not to play the game, the manual insists, but because they are true — and then, in a group of three to five, take seventy-five seconds each to say why each one…

Gratitude Practice

Appreciation strengthens connection and sustains motivation for long-term sustainability work. When teams notice and name what they value, they reinforce commitment to protecting it. When to use: As meeting closings,…

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, receives an answer from the guru's highest wisd…

Greeting Each Other

Everyone walks the room at their own pace and greets whoever they meet in the way the leader calls: eye contact, a wink, a smile, a grimace, a bow, a curtsey, a handshake, a clapping rhyme, a bump of the backsides, or…

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. Each prompt changes what the same handshake…

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, witnessing, expression, support) — in small group…

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 or alter an activity at any time. The m…

Group juggling

The group throws one ball around the circle in a fixed order until everyone knows who they receive from and who they throw to, then more balls are added until three are travelling the same pattern at once. The sheet a…

Guided Journaling (Theory U)

Writing through a scripted sequence of questions that walk the U: from current challenges and frustrations, through looking at your journey and self from outside, to the deeper questions — what in your work and life i…

Guided Presence

People mill, stop in front of someone, and hold eye contact while the facilitator reads a series of noticing prompts — let go of your story about this person, where is your attention, are you looking for validation, w…

Guru Game

On a higher chair, in touch with an inner guru, one person answers the group's questions — 'oh Guru, what is the meaning of life?', 'how can I decide when to stay with my lover or when to leave?' — fully in the role o…

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 traditional values and stands for hierarchy. T…

Half-Sentence Storytelling

Sitting in a ring, the group composes a story by each contributing half a sentence. The sheet suggests agreeing the kind of story first — a ghost story, perhaps.

Handshake Game

Stand before a partner in silent eye contact until you feel you have met them — only then offer your hand, and only shake when the other feels the same — before moving on to meet everyone in the room. A non-verbal way…

Head to Head

Everyone walks the room; the leader calls a body part and each person must quickly find whoever is nearest, put those body parts together, and move around the room joined like that until the next call sends them to a…

Headline

Each person draws a newspaper headline the leader has cut out and pasted up, and invents the event they think lies behind it, telling it to the group. Once everyone has, they pair up or form groups and start staging t…

Heard, Seen, Respected

In pairs, participants take turns telling a story about a time they were NOT heard, seen, or respected, while the partner listens without interrupting, fixing, or judging. A structured debrief surfaces what it takes t…

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 and anything else that might fall to be…

Helping Heuristics

Trios practice four escalating patterns of help in rapid rounds: quiet presence, guided questioning, giving advice, and coaching-style inquiry — with a client, a helper, and an observer who names what actually helped.…

Here We Come

Two teams face each other from opposite walls. One links arms and marches across chanting 'here we come!' until stopped at arm's length — 'not one step further until you show who you are!' — and mimes its identity for…

Higher Self-Talk

One person stands behind their chair as their higher self, and the group interviews it about them: how do you feel about Rob, does Rob listen to you, what do you want to tell him — or what is your purpose. Five to sev…

Honey, I love you, but I can’t smile

One person goes to another and says 'honey, if you love me, give me a smile'. The other has to reply, straight-faced, 'honey, you know I love you, but I just can't smile'. If they crack, they take the middle. The whol…

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 keep the focus on the person answering. Fo…

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 the character. Questions move from the ge…

House, Creature, Flood

Players build a house around one player who is the creature inside it. On 'house' the house rebuilds itself around the same creature; on 'flood' everybody scatters and finds another position.

How's Yours?

One person steps out; the group picks something they all have — a toothbrush, or childhood memories — and the guesser may only ask 'How's yours?', receiving vague true answers until they name the thing. Light, and the…

Hug Tag

Whoever is caught stands as a statue with their arms down at their sides and is released when a free player gives them a hug. With a large group the sheet suggests starting with two taggers.

Human Clay

Three people: a model who takes a sculptural position standing behind the clay so the clay cannot see them, the clay who is shapeless, and an artist who must form the clay into an exact copy of the model — without spe…

Human Knot

The group stands shoulder to shoulder in a circle, everyone reaches in and takes two other hands at random, and the tangle has to be undone without anyone letting go. People can go through, around, over or under each…

Human machine

One person starts a simple repeatable movement with a sound. Others join one at a time, each physically connecting to somebody already in it and adding a movement that fits, until the whole group is one machine. Group…

Humility Check

Humility recognizes that we are part of interconnected systems, not separate from them. It prevents overconfidence in solutions and keeps teams open to feedback and adjustment. When to use: When the team feels certain…

Humming Gates

Pairs stand facing each other around the room with their arms raised to form gates, and each pair hums continuously at its own pitch. One player, eyes closed and not humming, navigates the room by ear to find and pass…

I Don't Know About You

One partner simply lists things they do not know about the other — when you last spoke to your parents, what you think about drug use — with no obligation on the other to answer. The manual offers it as the way into C…

I Know That Hand

Two lines of partners take each other's hands and learn them by touch alone, then rotate so that everyone has studied everyone's hands. Then one line closes their eyes and holds out a hand; the other line shuffles and…

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 audience what they are actually thinking.…

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 manual says is new to many people, with s…

I Say

Instructions are only to be followed when they begin with 'I say…'. 'I say sit down' means sit down; a bare 'sit down' means stay put, and anyone who moves is out. The game itself starts and ends only when the caller…

I'm a Tree!

One person becomes a tree; two more join the scene as an apple, a squirrel — or the tree's self-doubt — and the tree chooses which stays to seed the next scene. A quick improv game that rewards thinking sideways.

I've Felt That

Name three emotions you felt at one moment in your life, with no story attached; your partner sits with the combination and tells of a time they felt those same three. However strange the mix, the manual says, someone…

I’ve got some news...

Two people stand in the middle of the circle; one gives the other a piece of news — you got the job, your holiday is cancelled — and the other simply reacts. No scene has to follow. When the reaction has run its cours…

Iceberg Model

The systems-thinking staple: start from a visible event and dig down through the layers beneath it — patterns and trends, systemic structures, and the mental models and paradigms that hold the structures in place — th…

Idea Generation

A structured creative round that alternates deliberately between divergent and convergent thinking — generate widely without judging, then narrow — so that a change initiative starts from a real spread of options rath…

If I Were a Tree

Lying with their own working space and eyes closed, participants are asked what tree they would be, and then led around it — how it would feel to be that tree, where you are, what you see, the season, the time of day,…

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 to the circle in the first person, as the…

Imagining the Future

A guided exercise that first loosens the imagination into an expanded state and then invites a concrete envisioning of a desired future — held long enough to notice details, feelings, and what it asks of the present.…

Imitation Introduction

Two minutes each to discover your partner's superpower — what they are uniquely good at, and how it shows in the moment — and then, around the circle, introduce your partner as them: their name, their superpower, in t…

Immunity to Change Map

A four-column mapping process that surfaces why sincere improvement goals stall: (1) the commitment to improve, (2) what I do/don't do instead, (3) hidden competing commitments protecting me, (4) the big assumptions u…

Impression Spectrum

One person takes the hot seat and closes their eyes; one end of the room is — in the manual's own words — 'I fucking love this person', the other 'I really don't like how this person is showing up', and everyone stand…

Impromptu Networking

Three rapid rounds of paired conversation (4–5 minutes each) on two questions: "what big challenge do you bring?" and "what do you hope to give and get?" Participants mill and re-pair each round. Loosens the room, see…

Improv Prototyping

Groups act out a chronic challenge scene three ways — the dysfunctional version, an improved version, and wild variants — with player groups performing while observer groups harvest what works. Serious fun that lets p…

Improvised Proverbs

Sitting in a ring, the group builds a proverb one word at a time. When somebody judges it complete they say 'full stop', and everyone presses their palms together fingertip to fingertip and whispers 'yes, yes, yes, ye…

In Groups Of…

The facilitator calls the manual's template — 'In groups of ___ make a ___' — with a number and a thing (its examples: a car, a human body, a crane, a house, a wedding set), and people scramble to assemble it with the…

Inception ("What's that like?")

One person says what they are feeling right now; the other may only ask 'what's that like?' — or 'what's it like to feel sad and be smiling at the same time?' — for two to five minutes, then swap. Restrictive on purpo…

Inclusive Decision-Making

Group decision-making built on the Lewis Method of Deep Democracy: every voice is actively sought, the minority "no" is heard and its wisdom added to the proposal before deciding, and the group learns why railroaded m…

Inclusive Listening Round

Effective sustainability work requires hearing diverse perspectives. This practice ensures quieter voices are included, strengthening the quality of decisions and building collective ownership. When to use: When some…

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.

Inside-Outside Presence

Training simultaneous attentiveness: staying in contact with one's own inner state while remaining fully attentive to the surroundings and other people — practiced in exercises and then deliberately applied inside eve…

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 suggests trying it in mime as well.

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 again repeating each insult back, outrag…

Integrated ~ Autonomy

For the perennial center-versus-local tension: groups examine where their organization needs standardization and where local autonomy creates value, then design "both-and" moves that strengthen each side without stran…

Integrating resource consciousness into the team's work outputs

The team's greatest environmental impact may not be its own consumption but the consequences of what it produces, recommends, or decides. Build habits of asking about resource and environmental implications of the tea…

Integrity, Accountability, Responsibility

Separates three words usually used interchangeably, and asks what it takes to embody each as a leader and instil them in a team. The guide places it in the chapter on making change last, on the reading that an initiat…

Intentional pauses

To slow down habitual autopilot responses and create space for more considered engagement. Introduce intentional pauses at key moments: • Before an important discussion, take 30 seconds of silence to gather thoughts •…

Interrelational Meditation

Mindfulness extended into relationship: in pairs, participants alternate between eyes-closed contact with their own present experience and open-eyed, non-judgmental seeing of the partner — noticing what arises in them…

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 answered. Ninety seconds on what interrupt…

Intervision on Inner Development

Recurring peer-coaching sessions where participants bring their own inner-development questions — a skill they're working on, a pattern they've noticed — and coach each other with structured intervision formats, pract…

Intimacies

Two circles facing each other; the inner person shares one intimacy with their partner — a truth, a withhold, an appreciation, a tag for later, or a projection to check — and the outer person only receives it, then th…

Into The Magic Shop

Partners name specific goals, then close their eyes and meditate on the future in which they are already achieved — viewed from several angles, with the facilitator asking what is in front of you and what happens next…

Introductions on One Letter

You introduce yourself — name, where you come from, dream destination, favourite dessert — with every single word forced to start with one chosen letter. The page's own example, run on B, is barely language any more,…

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, speaking their interests in first person so th…

Janus Dance

Two players dance slowly with each head resting on the other's shoulder, so neither can see the other's face, and play a two- or three-minute scene while dancing. The source recommends it for listening and for getting…

Jeans Journey

A ten-minute guided meditation that starts in the body and ends in the world: after settling into the breath, attention moves to the felt contact between skin and clothing — scratchy, smooth, stiff, soft — and from th…

Join In and Finish

Three people. One acts; the other two face away. One of those says 'freeze', comes in, works out what is going on and joins it. The third then says 'freeze', comes in, and at that point speech is allowed and the scene…

Kabuki Circling

Every chair in the circle carries one facilitation role — Sensor, Reflector, Empath, Group Mother, Witness, Depth Charge, Romantic, Dissenter, Body Tracker, Stud Finder, Time Traveler, Truth Seeker, Speaker for the Mo…

Keeper of the Keys

One person sits blindfolded on a chair with a set of keys underneath it while the circle tries to steal them without being heard. If the Keeper hears someone they point at where they think the theft is coming from, an…

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 are certain theirs is still while it swi…

Kind and Unkind

Ask people to say something kind to their neighbour, and then something unkind. The source's whole commentary is one sentence: the wrong effect is often achieved.

King Lizard

Everyone picks an animal with a sound and a motion. A player sends the impulse on by performing their own animal and then someone else's; that person does theirs and passes it on again. Mistakes put you out for the ro…

Kingdom

Someone takes the throne; the room becomes their subjects, and a facilitator asks them how it would feel to be ruled by this person — kind? just? able to make hard decisions? defend the kingdom? — or asks the ruler fo…

Kiss Kiss Diss

In a circle of five to ten who know each other, the person three seats to your left gives you a compliment — specific enough to land — the next gives another, and the person beside you gives one thing you could work o…

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.

Knife Baby Angry Cat

An invisible knife is thrown between players, ninja-style, with eye contact established before every throw. Once that is reliable, an imaginary baby is added — thrown carefully, with its own sound — and then an angry…

Know Your Theory of Change

Build a personal theory of change for your climate-coaching work: name your purpose and desired future, choose the political context you aim to work in with its stakeholders and power dynamics, list the resources and…

Ladder of Inference

Argyris's classic made practical: walk a charged conclusion back down the ladder — from the action taken, through beliefs, interpretations, and selected data, to the observable pool everyone actually saw — and discove…

Land, Sea, Shore

The room is divided into three: one end is land, the other is sea, the middle is shore. The leader calls one of them and everyone runs to that part of the room.

Laughter Circle

The group lies down in a circle with each person's head on someone else's stomach. One person says 'Ha!' — seriously. The next says 'Ha, ha!' The next 'Ha, ha, ha!' The moment anyone laughs, the circle starts again, w…

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 columns and the group works the overlap — wha…

Leadership in Action

Teams of four or five take a series of timed challenges, fifteen minutes each, with a different member leading every round and nobody leading twice until everyone has led once. After each challenge the team spends fiv…

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 share their experience of the team's wor…

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 them. After the immediate crisis is addres…

Learning Mindset Moment

Sustainability work involves learning and adaptation. An openness to learning helps teams adjust approaches rather than defending unsuccessful ones, strengthening the effectiveness of sustainability efforts. When to u…

Lens of Attention

The group answers the stem 'When I put my attention on ___, I notice ___' — first on objects the leader picks (breath, body, heart, the connection), then on anything anyone proposes, including a person in the room or…

Letter from the Future

Each person writes a letter to themselves AS a human living one or two centuries from now — offering counsel, gratitude, and encouragement to the person working at this hinge of history. Solo writing (~10 minutes), th…

Letter Number Name

Names, then letters of the alphabet, then numbers are passed around the circle, each with its own gesture. Once each stream works alone, they are all set going at once and travel around the circle simultaneously.

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 forward lets the original event keep cau…

Lighthouses and Boats

Half the group stand scattered across the floor as lighthouses; the other half line up at one end with their eyes closed as boats and have to cross to the far side. The lighthouses guide them by making a pip-pip sound…

Like, Like, GOOSE!

Duck-duck-goose with a twist: the walker touches each head with a one-word appreciation instead of 'duck', then says 'goose' and runs. The manual is clear the game lies in the ten minutes of sharebacks — how we receiv…

Listening Assessment

A daily solo tracking practice: at day's end, estimate how much of your listening happened at each of Scharmer's four levels — downloading (reconfirming what you know), factual, empathic, generative — and watch the pa…

Listening Into the Room

Everyone lies down in their own place and listens outward to sounds beyond the room, then to sounds in the room, then to sounds in themselves. The sheet offers the reverse order, a version where the leader makes the s…

Listening to a Story

Everyone settles comfortably and the leader tells a story. That is the whole exercise. The sheet notes a recording works as well, and that dimmed light shuts out the visual and makes it easier to build your own images.

Listening to Music

Everyone settles in their own place and listens actively to calm, preferably instrumental music, with something specific to listen for — individual instruments, or imagined settings. The sheet advises using pieces the…

Listening to Pause

A team dialogue structure built on deliberate silence: each person speaks for the same fixed time (e.g., five minutes); after each speaker, the group holds about a minute of pause before anyone responds. In the pause,…

Listening to the Surroundings

Everyone sits in silence and listens to the surroundings for about five minutes. Afterwards they compare what they heard — the ventilation, people outside, distant cars, the wind, the rain.

Listing Exercise

Worked alone with paper and pen: the leader asks a question and each person lists every answer they have to it. The sheet's examples are what it means to be a good friend, and as many good qualities in a friend as you…

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 door says something. The source likes t…

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—market conditions, technological change, regu…

Look up, look down

The circle looks at the floor. On 'look up' everyone raises their eyes and looks directly at one other person. Two people who find themselves looking at each other both scream, die theatrically, and leave the circle.…

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!', 'Great energy!' The exercise is the celebrati…

Love and Self-Love

Tell two people about someone you love, letting yourself feel it as you speak; hear what it did to them; then speak about why you love yourself with the same care and feeling, and hear that back too. An hour for three…

Love Blaster

Appreciate an object in the room for a minute — then close your eyes and appreciate the feeling of appreciating. Do it again with a partner and a second object. Then two pairs meet, and each whispers to each other wha…

Loving-Kindness / Compassion Meditation

The progressive compassion practice at the heart of most compassion trainings: settle into body and breath; direct kind, non-judging attention first to yourself (self-compassion), then to someone close, then to a neut…

Mad Tea and Calm Tea

Two concentric circles face each other; the facilitator fires open sentence-stems ("what I appreciate in this situation is…", "a next step for me is…") and pairs complete them fast before the outer circle rotates. Mad…

Magical Moments

A guided return to a moment in your life that felt magical — its smells, colours, sounds, textures, the mood you were in — relived with eyes closed for a minute or so, then shared round the circle as 'a magical moment…

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 small, achievable actions that keep progr…

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 difficulty, create space to acknowledge w…

Making connections vivid and real

To move connectedness from abstraction to felt reality by creating direct contact with those the team is connected to. Periodically create experiences that make the team's connections tangible: • Invite stakeholders,…

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, allowing the value-aligned one. Real dilemm…

Manage Your Inner Drivers

A self-reflection for coaches before they ever sit down with a politician: interrogate your own opinions and assumptions about people in public office — where they came from, whether they are fair — through seven ques…

Mapping the Maze

Using the Transition Model Canvas, groups map a socio-technical transition — zero-emission mobility, circular textiles — across actors, dynamics, and intervention points, learning to understand, evaluate, and accelera…

Massage

The circle turns and everyone gives the person in front of them a shoulder massage, then turns around and returns it. The source adds that judgement is needed about what is appropriate for the particular group.

Massage Story

In pairs, one person sits behind the other and draws on their back while the leader tells a story — rain drummed with the fingertips, getting harder; a cat's paws picking their way across with bent knuckles; a fir tre…

Meanwhile

A scene is playing. At some point the audience calls 'meanwhile…' and a fresh set of players starts a completely new scene. When 'meanwhile' is called again the first scene resumes. It moves back and forth between the…

Meditation on Meeting Needs

A ten-minute guided meditation on the machinery underneath consumption: resting with the breath, participants observe moods and feelings as they shift, and notice the subtle sense of NEEDING that rides along — the pul…

Meet My Essence

Mill and introduce yourself as the self you first show people — and say how and why you show up that way: 'I'm really loving and warm and soft when I meet people, so you HAVE to love me.' A participant called it five…

Meet Yourself at 90

A guided values visualization from the ACT tradition: after settling into body and breath, participants imagine themselves at their 90th birthday, visited by someone who matters to them — and hear that person say exac…

Meeting check-ins

To help team members arrive mentally and emotionally at the meeting. Begin meetings with a brief check-in round. Each person shares briefly in response to a simple prompt: • 'How are you arriving today?' • 'What's one…

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 successfully, take time to pause and apprec…

Mimic Tag

Whoever is caught starts miming an activity — boxing, dancing, tying their shoelaces — and stays stuck in it until a free player stands opposite them and copies what they are doing, which sets them loose. Everyone sti…

Min Specs

Groups draft the maximum list of dos and don'ts for a purpose, then ruthlessly test each item: "if we broke this rule, could we still achieve the purpose?" Everything that survives is a genuine minimum specification;…

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 take into their own waistband — while gua…

Mindful Nature Walk

The entry-level nature-connection practice: a walk in forest or park with attention deliberately in relationship — naming trees, listening to layered sounds, feeling the carrying ground, smelling and tasting the air,…

Mindful Pause (Informal Practice)

The informal half of mindfulness training: bringing awareness deliberately into everyday activities — pausing before responding where one would otherwise act through habit or impulse. A seconds-to-minutes micro-practi…

Minis

Three minutes to say or do whatever helps you arrive, while your partner witnesses in silence; then they ask a presencing question — what colour are your socks, how does your left finger feel — and you swap. Seven min…

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 variation hides who is mirroring whom; an…

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 see in themselves and the group rates tho…

Mirror Sessions

In pairs facing each other, one person moves and the other mirrors the movement and the facial expression as closely as they can. A performance variation asks a pair to mirror in front of the group so that nobody watc…

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 happening to them, and then asks you: 'do…

Mirrored Feelings

In pairs facing each other, one person takes on a feeling and speaks gibberish so that the feeling comes through; the other answers in gibberish, mirroring the feeling as exactly as they can. It is a dialogue rather t…

Molecule Tag

The tagger takes the hand of whoever they catch and the two hunt on together, growing to three; only the outermost hands can tag, since the inner ones are already holding on. When a fourth is caught the chain splits i…

Monster and Fairy Tag

One player is a monster and crosses the floor as hideously as they can, with noises; everyone else are fairies tripping on tiptoe. A tagged fairy becomes a monster, so the monsters multiply — until one fairy is left,…

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 stability-and-equanimity practice, usable sol…

Moving Interaction

Mill around; whenever you meet someone's eyes or bump into them, interact — a sound, a gesture, a touch — then move on. Anyone offered a physical interaction they do not want gives a silent hands-to-heart 'namaste' 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 beforehand. Then a few minutes of noticings and a…

Multi-horizon tracking

To make visible the team's progress and impact across multiple time horizons. Create a simple tracking tool that includes indicators across at least three time horizons: Operational indicators (weekly/monthly): How ar…

Multiple Perspectives Round

Effective sustainability work requires understanding diverse stakeholder perspectives. This helps teams consider how decisions affect different groups and find approaches that work across differences. When to use: Whe…

My Best Qualities

Three questions answered privately — what am I proud of, what was my most courageous act, what do I most value about myself — then one of them spoken around the whole circle. The facilitator thanks each person and nam…

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 of the group becomes each picture. The s…

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 peers what actually prevents it, and co…

Myself — My Friend

An opening self-attention exercise for people used to defining themselves by their roles. Participants say the first thing that comes to mind when asked to think about themselves — the handbook expects embarrassment,…

Name Round

The plainest name exercise there is — everyone says their name around the ring — with three escalations the page supplies: say it twice with a three-second gap in which everyone repeats it silently to themselves; or h…

Name Volley

Two teams of up to six play mimed volleyball, and every pass is made by calling the name of the player who must receive it. The requirement is that the imaginary ball stays visible to everyone throughout.

Nature Quest

Structured solo time in wild nature in three phases: preparation (practical questions, naming worries, setting intention), the quest itself — going alone to a chosen place, leaving everyday patterns behind, meeting th…

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, with what confidence, what would change…

Network Relationship Patterns

Quartets use a shared vocabulary of ten recurring work-relationship patterns to name how they actually interact — where energy flows, where it drains — and pick one pattern to shift. Giving relational dynamics names m…

Next Step Commitment

Sustainability work requires action, not just discussion. This practice builds habits of translating awareness into concrete next steps. When to use: At the end of meetings, when momentum is needed, to translate discu…

Next…

Around the circle, each person tells the one on their left something they themselves would like to hear — 'you're not going to fall apart', 'your mother loves you', 'you don't have to be perfect' — spoken directly, as…

No, Oh Really, Yes

In pairs, planning something together — a party, a picnic — in three passes. First each idea is demolished and replaced, as creatively as possible. Then each idea is accepted, but sceptically, as if you had to go alon…

Normalizing acknowledgment of limitations and uncertainty

To create a culture where acknowledging what you do not know and admitting mistakes is normal and valued. Build explicit norms around acknowledging limitations. The team leader goes first by regularly modeling: • 'I d…

Norms for addressing harm directly

To establish team expectations that when harm occurs, it will be acknowledged and addressed. Discuss and establish team norms around addressing harm: • When someone feels harmed by a colleague's actions, the expectati…

Norms for effective information sharing

Teams need information to function, but information flow is often inadequate. Establish explicit agreements about information sharing: what information should be shared, with whom, through what channels, and with what…

Noticing and naming team patterns in real-time

To develop the team's capacity to notice what is happening in the moment. Cultivate the habit of pausing to name what is happening: • 'I notice the energy dropped when we started discussing that topic.' • 'It seems li…

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 that invite sharing about how people are d…

Noting

In pairs, holding eye contact, one person speaks a single word for whatever passes through awareness — thought, sensation, itch, fear, blankness — for three minutes or more, then roles swap. Meditation's labelling pra…

NVC Dialogue Practice

Practicing Marshall Rosenberg's core sequence on a real tension, in pairs or triads: state the observation without evaluation, name the feeling, connect it to the underlying need, and make a doable request — then swit…

Object in a circle

An object sits in the middle of the circle — the more abstract the better. People step in one at a time and use it as something it is not, playing the use clearly enough that the group can guess. A pool noodle becomes…

Obstacle Tag

Tag in pairs, played in cartoon spirit — Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny. The one being chased fends off the chaser with mimed obstacles: felling a large tree in their path, painting a door onto a wall.

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 hilarious — and everyone already aboard ado…

Onboarding in Transdisciplinary Collaboration

A team-forming opening for transdisciplinary projects: students, teachers, and external partners build meaningful connection before building work plans — sharing backgrounds, motivations, and what each needs from the…

One Scene Affects Another

Two scenes with entirely different casts, not necessarily in the same place or period. The rule is that the second must raise the stakes of the first without anyone from the first being in it — if A loves a hesitant B…

One Stops, All Stop

Everyone walks the room in different directions, asked to think of the floor as a raft that tips if too many people are on one side, so the group keeps redistributing itself. If anyone stops, everyone stops; when anyo…

One Time…

True stories one sentence long, each beginning 'One time…', going round the group and then popcorn-style — with the rule that you tell the story that comes after the last person finishes, not the one you thought of wh…

One Too Many

Three to seven players, and as the name says, one actor is surplus — one player has to be excluded from the group. Naturally everyone wants to belong and not be the one left out, so each plays to avoid exclusion while…

One Voices Everyone

Several actors on stage appear to be talking, but one person off to the side speaks every line for all of them. The silent actors have to fit their bodies and movements to words they are not choosing and cannot antici…

One-Word Performance

Two pairs on stage, and each pair plays a single character between them — the two actors in a pair take turns saying one word at a time. So a two-hander is played by four people, and neither half of a character can fi…

One-Word Story in Pairs

In pairs, a story built by taking turns to add one word each. The source notes that doing it as a whole ring is usually harder than doing it in twos — and offers writing a letter instead of a story.

One-Word Storytelling

Sitting in a ring, the group writes a story together by each saying a single word in turn. The sheet's advice is to settle what kind of story it is first — a fairy tale, a documentary — before anyone starts.

Open Sentences

Pairs sit face to face; one speaks, completing a sentence-stem read aloud by the facilitator ("When I see what's happening to the natural world, what breaks my heart is…"), while the partner listens in complete recept…

Open Space Technology

Self-organizing conference format for 5 to 2000 people around a question that matters: participants themselves post the sessions, form the agenda in the opening circle, and move between conversations by the "law of tw…

Operational Strategies

Looks at what makes a team's success last — the support systems, agreements and structures behind it — rather than at the initiative itself. The guide's closing activity, and the one that asks what will still be stand…

Options Place

A meeting without a preset agenda: participants post the topics they care about on a breakout board, sessions run in parallel stations, and people move freely to wherever they contribute or learn most. Liberating Stru…

Order With Topics

A topic is chosen — countries, say — and the first person points at somebody and says Ghana. That person points at somebody else and says another country. The rule that makes it work: you never lower your pointing arm…

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 and to work each differently, with time…

Owning Our Judgments

Round one: everyone voices an unowned judgment that is true for them right now — 'I feel like this game is stupid.' Round two: each repeats it and says what is more true underneath — 'what's more true for me is that I…

Owning outcomes rather than just completing tasks

Reactive teams complete tasks. Proactive teams take ownership of outcomes—they care about the larger result, not just their piece. Frame work in terms of outcomes to achieve, not just tasks to complete. Help people se…

P.I.E.S.

Each person gives a one-to-ten number for how they are, then says how they are doing physically, intellectually, emotionally and socially or spiritually, thirty to sixty seconds a category, while the others only liste…

Pair Introductions

In pairs, people interview each other on three questions — your name, your favourite ice cream, what you would be doing if you weren't here — and then each introduces the other to the whole group. A second set of ques…

Pair Tag

Everyone pairs up and one pair is it. They chase the other pairs, and a pair they catch becomes it instead. The sheet asks the leader to decide first how pairs stay joined — hand in hand, linked arms, or each holding…

Panarchy

Groups map how their challenge lives at multiple embedded system levels — individual, team, organization, sector, society — and where change at one level enables or blocks change at another. Identifies which level the…

Pandora's Box

Four rounds of stems, twice round the circle each: 'inside of me, I notice…', 'outside of me, I notice…', 'if you really knew me, you would be curious about…', and 'to really know me, it is important that you are curi…

Participate as a Pro

Teams leave the classroom to connect with local actors and co-initiate real participation: engaging professionals directly with the people affected by their work, learning to serve a process they don't control — humil…

Parts of a Thing

Each group is given a thing made of several parts — a bicycle, a lawnmower, a tent — and each person a private slip naming which part they are: saddle, front wheel, rear wheel, cyclist, handlebars. Nobody may show the…

Pattern identification discussions

To build the team's ability to notice recurring patterns across situations. Periodically hold a discussion specifically focused on patterns: Internal patterns: What situations keep recurring? What problems do we solve…

Peep Tag

One chaser, one chased, and everyone else standing in queues of three. The chased can join the back of any queue and shout 'peep', which makes them safe — and shunts whoever is at the front of that queue out to become…

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 something they have learned recently—a techniqu…

Performance in a Minute

A group is given one minute to prepare a performance. The brief can add conditions — that it be about a particular theme, run at least so many minutes, or contain at least so many scenes — and the shortness of the pre…

Periodic team health assessment

To create structured opportunity for the team to assess its own functioning. Use questions that team members respond to individually, followed by collective discussion. Dimensions might include: • Clarity of purpose a…

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 examples? 2. Where have we fallen short…

Personal Behavior Change (five-step process)

A repeatable five-question process for a behaviour or emotional pattern someone wants to shift: Awareness (what am I actually doing), Meaning (why does changing it matter to me), Vision (how would I like to be), Mind…

Personal Polarity Map

Barry Johnson's polarity mapping applied to personal growth: an eight-step paper exercise that reframes a stuck self-improvement wish ("be clearer") as one pole of a polarity whose other pole holds a value you rightly…

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 and articulate different positions. Each…

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 process exploring five dimensions of each pers…

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 implementation, resources, workflow • Human impact…

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 context that has you relating this way. A tou…

Persson to Karlsson

Pairs face each other while a caller stands on a chair in the middle naming pairs of body parts to be put together — index finger to forehead, elbow to knee, toe to toe — each held while the next is added. When the ca…

Pictures

Each person draws a picture — objects, places or abstracts, cut from magazines or the leader's own — and invents a story the picture could belong to, telling or playing it to the group. Then people are put into groups…

Poem Reading

Each person gets one verse of a poem without knowing who has the others or what the whole is, and works out its feeling, who is speaking, to whom, why and where, then performs it. Afterwards the leader assembles the p…

Poetic Motivations

Each participant drafts an "I poem" — a structured poem about identity and values ("I am… I believe… I carry…") — revealing the intrinsic motivations behind their engagement with change, then shares it aloud in the gr…

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 then stage a meeting between the charac…

Positive Gossip

Pairs "gossip" about colleagues — strictly positively: telling stories of what someone did well, as if the person weren't listening. Rounds rotate so everyone gossips and is gossiped about. A fifteen-minute pattern in…

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 options each framing produces. Optimism built…

Postcard Storytelling

Sitting in a ring, the group writes a postcard together one word at a time. The sheet's advice is to settle first where you are and who the card is going to; punctuation can count as words or be skipped.

Practices for genuine dialogue

Dialogue is exploratory conversation aimed at developing shared understanding. Creating space for genuine dialogue requires structural conditions and conversational practices. Structural conditions: protected time (45…

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 plan modified. Prospective hindsight le…

Presence Pause

Presence helps us notice when automatic reactions or convenience are pulling us away from sustainability commitments. It creates space for more considered responses aligned with long-term responsibility. When to use:…

Principles Walk-Around

The ten Liberating Structures principles — or a group's own espoused principles — are posted around the room; people walk, stand by one, and examine honestly where daily habits live up to it and where they quietly con…

Process-focused debriefs

To build the habit of reflecting not just on outcomes but on processes. After significant meetings, decisions, or interactions, take 5-10 minutes to debrief not just what was decided but how the process went: • How wa…

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: When progress feels slow, after completing…

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 for this to work? 2. Rank by uncertainty…

Progressive Touch

Forty-five minutes of touch that builds by stages, a minute each: breathing together, gazing, hands almost touching, then fingertips, then whole hands and forearms, a short contact dance, then one partner 'sculpts' th…

Prolonged Eye Contact

Two circles of chairs facing each other; sit, and hold eye contact in silence for anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes, then share. The manual suggests keeping it short with a new group, and offers a guided ve…

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 whatever they are standing nearest and build…

Protected time for genuine dialogue

To create recurring opportunities for deeper, more present conversation. Periodically create protected time for dialogue that is not structured around an agenda or task. Explore questions together: • 'What is the most…

Prototyping (Theory U)

Explore the future by doing: a small core team (~5, a microcosm of the challenge) moves an idea into a concrete experiential prototype — clarify intention, sense the system, hold stillness, build, iterate with feedbac…

Psychological Safety Micro-Behaviours

An individual practice run inside real teamwork: deliberately doing the small things research links to team psychological safety — asking genuine questions, speaking up about your own mistakes first, inviting quiet co…

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 addressed), and a Story of Now (the urg…

Purpose connection moments

To maintain a thread between daily work and larger purpose. At the beginning or end of regular team meetings, include a brief moment connecting to purpose. This can take different forms: • One team member shares a mom…

Purpose-To-Practice (P2P)

A design session for anything meant to last: the group works through five elements in order — Purpose (why the work matters to those affected), Principles (must-dos and must-not-dos), Participants (who must be include…

Purposeful Storytelling

A longer arc from inner values to shared story: participants identify what drives them, find like-minded peers, formulate shared values together, and craft a story that communicates those values outward — purpose work…

Quarterly purpose reflection dialogue

To keep the team's sense of purpose alive and connected to daily work. Once per quarter, dedicate 60-90 minutes to a structured dialogue focused on team purpose. Address questions such as: • What is our team's core pu…

Question Ambassador

Two concentric circles of chairs; each person chooses one stem they will ask everyone, asks it for a minute, answers their partner's for a minute, and the outer circle rotates. A way to run an intimate survey of a who…

Race Cars

One partner closes their eyes and walks; the other steers from behind by the shoulders, keeping them clear of everything, as the facilitator calls higher gears until the room is nearly running. Drivers then close thei…

Radio Theatre

Groups build a place entirely out of sound made with mouths and bodies — no speech — and perform it to the others, who listen with their eyes closed. The next steps are to render a sequence of events the same way, and…

Rain Massage

In pairs, one stands behind the other and begins by tapping lightly with the fingertips over the head, moving down to the shoulders and then over the back and out along the arms. The leader calls the swap.

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, not the story), and Nurture with self-c…

Ranking Exercise

Participants are given a theme or question and rank options — freely or from a given set — by which is most important, most common, most dangerous. The sheet's own example builds on its Listing Exercise: from the qual…

Reach Out, Touch Me

Sit with a partner and connect without words, a minute or more at each stage: only fingertips touching, then hands, then hands and arms — eyes open or closed as you choose. Then talk. Meant to slow connection down to…

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. Major disruptions require acknowledgment…

Reflecting on belonging to larger wholes

To cultivate the felt sense of belonging to larger systems. Periodically create space for reflection on the team's place in larger contexts: Our team within the organization: What is our role in the larger whole? How…

Regular appreciation rounds

To create recurring opportunities for team members to express appreciation for each other. Include a brief appreciation round in regular team meetings: each person has the opportunity (not requirement) to acknowledge…

Regular long-term reflection sessions

To step back from immediate work and consider longer time horizons. Dedicate 60-90 minutes to a session focused on longer-term perspective, addressing questions at multiple scales: Team direction: Where do we want to…

Regular team retrospectives

To create ongoing opportunities to reflect on how the team is working. Hold a retrospective every two to four weeks with a simple format: What has been going well that we should continue? What has not been going well…

Relaxation: Breathing

Participants lie or stand apart from each other and breathe to a square: in through the nose, down into the belly and up through the ribs to the collarbones; hold; out through the mouth from the top down, the last of…

Relay Massage

Half the group stands scattered with eyes closed; the others move among them massaging, relay fashion. Nobody standing may be left alone — whoever is spare goes to someone who is working and takes over from them, and…

Renew Yourself Tag

When the tagger catches you, both of you stop and you must improvise an action — skipping rope, singing, ice skating. The tagger can interrupt at any moment with 'renew yourself', and you must start something new imme…

Requests Training

One partner asks the other for a die, or a sweet, over and over for a couple of minutes; the holder gives it only when the asking feels genuine — and it is handed straight back to be asked for again. Then stems for th…

Restorative Circles

A community process for conflict developed by Dominic Barter with residents of Rio's favelas: those who acted, those affected, and their community meet in facilitated circles — pre-circles first, then the circle itsel…

Restorative Dialogue

A repair practice for after classroom or team "hot moments": once a discussion has run too intense, the group returns to it deliberately — reflecting on what happened, exchanging how it landed, and restoring working r…

Results Chain

Plans an initiative as a chain from activities through outputs and outcomes to impact, and uses it to track progress rather than to predict. The guide explicitly ties it back to the iceberg: the further along the chai…

Reverse Chair Dance

Musical chairs inverted: when the music stops, the player without a chair has to get their feet off the ground some other way. Chairs keep being removed, so by the end everyone is climbing onto and clinging to each ot…

Rhythmic Story

The group establishes a steady beat and one person tells a story with one word on each beat, so the words come at an even pace with no room to search for them. Variations: the circle takes turns supplying the words on…

Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament

Pairs play rock-paper-scissors; each loser falls in behind the winner as a cheering entourage, and the chain follows its champion to the next bout, until the whole room stands behind one person taking a victory lap. A…

Rolling Statues

Groups of about four: the first goes in and takes a position, the second follows, and so on. In the rolling version — in a group of nine, five are always on stage — as one person steps on another steps off, so the pic…

Rooms Of The Heart

'If my heart had different rooms, the one I use the most is…' — one person describes a room in themselves, a playful room or a work room, and how it is to have the others in it with them; the group gets curious, then…

Rose, Bud, Thorn

Each person names a rose (something going well), a bud (something new or full of possibility) and a thorn (something hard), then picks who goes next. Simple enough for a company meeting or a family dinner; the manual'…

Run To Center