F4A Resource library

This Storyboarding Toolkit has over 150 hand-drawn visual assets for you to create storyboards, to bring your customer and product ideas and stories to life in Miro.

Ben Crothers | Bright Pilots

Are you looking to level up your facilitation skills and guide groups with more confidence and effectiveness? Whether you're just starting out or you're a seasoned facilitator looking to upskill, this comprehensive guide will lead you to the best facilitation training courses out there.

Cheska Teresa | Butter.us

David Sibbet, the founder of The Grove Consultants International and pioneer of the field of visual, organizational consulting, explains the four flows of facilitation.

David Sibbet | The Grove Consultants International

This kit is for the use of Business Support Organisations or others keen to support companies in designing Roadmaps towards Responsible Innovation.

Responsible Innovation Compass

A collection of workshop tools curated by Hyper Island

Hyper Island

Design Method Toolkit for agile, team-based projects

Digital Society School

Thinking routines help to reveal students’ thinking to the teacher and also help students themselves to notice and name particular “thinking moves,” making those moves more available and useful to them in other contexts.

Project Zero | Harward Graduate School of Education

A team effectiveness model is a tool or framework to help businesses and leaders understand how well their teams function and improve team building, management, and training to ultimately boost performance and accomplish shared goals.

AIHR

A compilation of methods for each one of the human-centered design cycles: Discover, Decide, Make, and Validate.

US Government

In this talk, Brittni breaks down 5 simple ways that you can make sure your next workshop is a huge success with your team AND what it actually takes to get your expertise noticed by your client or manager.

Brittni Bowering

A directory of methods, tools, and frameworks you can use within teams, clustered in several topics: communicating, empathizing, ideating, leading, planning, teambuilding.

SYPartners

Change resources and templates to inspire and equip leaders to make positive change.

Fearless Culture

A wonderful resource covering 7 innovation phases and 30 tools across all of them. It helps to make the case for open innovation and shows how to co-create or crowdsource relevant ideas, prototype the best ones, and construct strong partnerships.

100open

A collection of books about Creativity, Curiosity, + Play

Rachel Davis

The New York Times bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work.

Chip & Dan Heath

Resources to help you make your content and learning materials accessible for disabled and neurodivergent learners, people with chronic illnesses, non-native language speakers and more.

Lotti Kershaw

One in five people today have a disability or an access need, that might require accessibility adjustments. Marie put together these resources to help you understand what will make the biggest difference in the accessibility of your next event.

Marie Dubost

The Scaling Impact Toolkit is a collection of resources structured into three stages – Strategy, Model and Implementation – with tools to help you at each stage. The goal is to help teams and organisations worldwide to scale their impact.

Spring Impact

This guide is for anyone curious about a hybrid workplace and implementing one into their organization. It will help you better understand and navigate the evolving and complex hybrid workplace so you can decide if it’s the best fit for your team.

Voltage Control

Ideation method for Design Thinking Workshops and Design Sprints

Sebastian F Mueller

These meeting tool templates are designed to encourage simultaneous participation from everyone in your remote meeting.

Mike Clargo

The CoReflect Toolkit consists of a set of fourteen evaluation cards. Use them to evaluate co-design processes, gain insights, and improve future co-creative work. Each card contains an exercise, that can be used as an individual or as a group exercise at the end of a workshop.

CCSDI

Activities and ideas for making agile retrospectives more engaging

Caroli.org

A compilation of great debriefing questions.

The Debriefing Cube

Tired of cringe-inducing icebreakers? We asked professional facilitators to share the virtual icebreakers they actually use to kick off their remote workshops.

Anamaria Dorgo | The Butter Team

This guide provides a resource for hosting and harvesting in virtual environments utilizing the practices, principles, frameworks and methods from the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter.

Art of Hosting

Over 100 freely accessible templates now, from retrospectives to canvases.

Chris Stone

We've rounded up our top 21 picks on inspiring facilitation podcasts that every facilitator should add to their library.

Anamaria & Cheska | Butter Team

In this video, Dee Scarano, expert, full-time facilitator, shares the 12 things she does to elevate her facilitation game from good to great. These are simple yet highly-effective techniques and tactics that all facilitators can implement—whether you’re running your first ever workshop or your fifty-first.

Dee Scarano

A beautiful collection of tools and methods covering all stages of service design: research, ideation, prototyping, implementation and evaluation. They also have a section called "enhanced tools" that cover complex topics like behavioural change, systems thinking, and future casting.

std

A tool which supports groups in decision making and helping them become more conscious of their decision making.

NOBL

Here’s one quick, simple exercise to get creative muscles warmed up. We learned it from David’s mentor, Bob McKim, back when David was a product design student. It’s called Thirty Circles, and you can do it on your own or in a group. The goal is to push people to test their creativity by turning circles into recognizable objects in a very short period of time.

IDEO

Designed by J.P. Guilford in 1967, the Alternative Uses Test asks you to think of as many uses as possible for a simple object, like a brick or a shoe or a paperclip. The test is usually time-constrained. Practicing this widely used divergent thinking test will help you develop your ability to think creatively. Why not try it out for yourself!Take an object, give yourself a time constraint, for example two minutes, and try to come up with as many alternate uses for that object as possible.

Creative Huddle

You have three minutes to add lines to the figures below to make pictures out of them. Try to tell a story with your pictures and give each picture a title.

Hannah Madans

Mash-ups is a collaborative idea generation method in which participants come up with innovative concepts by combining different elements together. Mash-ups demonstrates how fast and easy it can be to come up with innovative ideas.

Hyper Island

You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking. This workshop helps people engage with each other and think visually - it's a fantastic mapping exercise with focus on building a systems model of an important challenge, ie: clarifying your vision, improving cash flow, figuring out the next bold challenge. Bonus, it’s fun!

Hyper Island

The best time to use this activity is when you find yourself or your team stuck on a problem or generating humdrum ideas. What makes it fun is that it removes limitations or governors on ideas. To begin, first think about the problem you’re trying to solve. Then pair it with a corresponding alter ego.

Kimberly Crawford

A toolkit everyone looking to learn more about Systemic Design. It contains 17 step-by-step methods and a detailed guide for setting up Systemic Design workshops.

CoLab

An open-source online learning platform that allows users, authors, viewers, students, and instructors to collaborate in the development of interactive, associative, and multi-modal content.

UBC Vancouver

Make beautiful boards to collect, organize, and present anything.

The Health Monitor is your team's chance to take an honest look in the mirror. You'll assess your team against the eight attributes most commonly found among healthy teams. At the end of Health Monitor session, you'll identify strengths to exploit as well as challenge areas to grow.

Allassian

Plays are free workshop resources for addressing common team challenges and starting important conversations.

Atlassian

This helps the group evaluate any ideas they may have gotten out of the brainstorming phase. It traditionally uses the variables: Easy to implement to impossible to implement, and normal ideas to original ideas to start to cluster. After the plotting on the matrix I would hold a voting activity for the group to then vote on their top 3 ideas with something like dot voting. Just so you can prioritize.

Dave Gray | Gamestorming

The sailboat retrospective is a retrospective technique where you and your agile team members will envision the last sprint as a sailboat. It’s a visual way for your team to identify what pushed the project forward, as well as what held it back.

10 for 10 is the fastest, easiest and most commonly used brainstorming method at AJ&Smart!

AJ&Smart

This framework helps a user or group conduct an analysis by visually categorizing positive (rose), potential (bud), or negative (thorn) aspects of a topic (e.g., system, product, process).

Mitre Innovation Toolkit

A collection of over 140 fee canvases to choose from

The Canvas Revolution

Film producer and innovator Walt Disney used to think-up and refine ideas by breaking the process into three distinct chunks. The dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler (or critic).

Idea Sandbox

The Mash-up emphasizes quantity. The more ideas you come up with, the better chance you have to reach a truly brilliant solution. It also applies constraints. Quick sprints drive creative sessions and avoid burnout. Perhaps most importantly, it helps us start down the path from the ridiculous to the radical solution.

IDEO

Cover Story is a game about pure imagination. The purpose is to think expansively around an ideal future state for the organization; it’s an exercise in visioning. The object of the game is to suspend all disbelief and envision a future state that is so stellar that it landed your organization on the cover of a well-known magazine.

Gamestorming

It might be hard to imagine ever getting excited about opening your inbox. 😅 But picture the thrill of opening your email to fresh insights that supercharge your facilitation skills. Here, we've cherry-picked the top nine facilitation newsletters that grace our inboxes regularly. Read on!

Butter

We’ve compiled 30 must-read books every facilitator should have on their bookshelf – so get ready to crack open some powerful stories, great advice, and inspiring thoughts as you transport yourself through ideas from authors around the world!

Butter

AJ&Smart's Jakub Michalski shares actionable tips for winning more business as a facilitator.

Jakub Michalski

It can be as simple as ‘just’ sending a survey, or emailing a couple of questions to attendees, but there’s a lot to think about. Follow these steps to make sure you’re getting the most out of your workshop feedback.

Pip Decks

Sean Mc Guire

Workshops are used to explore a specific topic, to transfer knowledge, to solve identified problems, or to create something new. In funded research projects and other research endeavours, workshops are the mechanism used to gather the wider project, community, or interested people together around a particular topic. However, natural questions arise: how do we measure the impact of these workshops? Do we know whether they are meeting the goals and objectives we set for them? What indicators should we use? In response to these questions, this paper will outline rules that will improve the measurement of the impact of workshops.

In order to make learning stick, we focus on ‘building one’s transfer muscles’ by using science-based transfer tools and interventions. To make learning professionals even fitter, we have partnered with The Institute For Transfer Effectiveness spearheaded by Dr. Ina Weinbauer-Heidel, who has been passionately working towards increasing the effectiveness of training and development programs for many years now.

The Learning Gym

Time is such a precious commodity. People have chosen to give this up to take part in your workshop, so you need to treat it with respect. If you struggle with timekeeping when you facilitate, how do you get better at it? Here are a few suggestions.

Franco London

Two concrete techniques you can use in your workshops to stay in track

Ryan McKergow

Although we pay a lot of attention to the design and facilitation of workshops, the workshop follow-up is often left as an afterthought. Even a great workshop will lose its impact if you don’t make the most of the momentum that was created on the day.

Alison Coward

Follow-up is essential in all training situations as it provides participants with further support and skill development. Also, follow-up improves existing trainings as well as future training plans. The lecturers get a feedback on what the participants actually learned during the training, whereas the participants have the opportunity to reflect on their learning a second time.

Stefanie Keller (Ecosan Services Foundation)

Connecting again not only ensures that participants get the most out of their experience, but can also help you build valuable professional relationships. Not sure where or how to begin your post-presentation outreach? Here, 14 members of Forbes Communication Council share their best advice for making it happen.

Forbes

Becoming a facilitator is a great career move, and learning the basics of facilitation is easier than you might think! In this article, we’ll lay out all the things you’ll need to consider when embarking on your facilitation journey. 

Workshopper

The benefits of inclusive meetings are endless. Employees feel valued, heard, and respected, while teams and organizations benefit from a diversity of ideas and perspectives. If you haven’t yet given much thought to the inclusivity of your meeting culture, now is the time—starting with this guide.

Workshopper

If you’re new to co-facilitation (or just want to get better at it), look no further. This is your ultimate guide, and it covers everything you need to know.

Workshopper

Skeptics require a little (sometimes a lot) more convincing as to why your workshop is valuable, and you’ll need to work a bit harder to get them motivated.It sounds daunting, but let us reassure you: there’s no need to sweat the skeptics. With these 9 tried-and-tested strategies, you’ll be equipped to diffuse any potential scenes as they arise. Who knows, you may even turn your skeptics into workshop evangelists…

Workshopper

Let's dive into the world of creative breakout session ideas for 2023 and discover how to plan, organize, and measure the success of these engaging experiences.

GoGather

When done correctly, breakout sessions are an excellent opportunity to have candid conversations and connect with other participants on a more intimate level than a broader meeting allows. But when planned poorly, breakout sessions can feel disjointed, nerve-wracking, and boring — or even a waste of time.

Miro

Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated. There are currently dozens of Lean Coffees happening world-wide, including Seattle, San Francisco, Stockholm, Toronto, Boulder, New York City, and more.

Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith

Ground rules are guidelines that participants in a meeting agree to follow in order to make the meeting more productive and enjoyable. Common ground rules include things like being respectful of other participants, not interrupting, and staying on topic.

Facilitator School

This exercise makes you think collectively of behaviours you want to strive and avoid within your team and the project you’re facing. In the end you’ll have a social contract which you’ve agreed to with all the members within the team.

Mischief Makers

Franco London

A collection of check-in, check-out and connection activities for workshops and meetings

Mischief Makers

A virtual collection for check-in qeustions and conversation prompts

Abracademy

This article will show you how to create and write effective training objectives.

Aris Apostoloulos for TalentLMS

In this article, we explore what training objectives are, highlight their importance, outline how to create them and provide examples of objectives for different scenarios.

Indeed

In this article, we explore the role of training objectives, how they guide the learning process and contribute to increased motivation, focused outcomes, and ultimately, improved performance.

WhatFix

Practical examples of how you can engage your audience online.

Mischief Makers

The 5-stages of group development by Susan Wheelan.  It combines various theories, offers a comprehensive overview, and is always the first stop on our tour into group dynamics and group development.

Mischief Makers

The Well of Knowledge is a reflection tool, about figuratively diving into the deep (the four layers of the well) to better understand learning.

Mischief Makers

Audience analysis is the process of gathering information about the targeted training audience in to design effective training programs that cater to the learners’ preferences and motivations. Data gathered can determine barriers to success as well as which training methods will be most effective.

The Training Industry

A blueprint for project scoping, including pitfalls to avoid.

Forbes

A Scope of Work (SOW) is a document that defines how a project will be executed through specific tasks, activities, deliverables, and timelines. An SOW also provides important legal protections for both you and your client.

MBO Partners

Consulting firm clients occasionally (or frequently) don’t live up to their obligations on a project—mid-project approvals come late, or not at all, critical information is missing, etc. Sometimes, clients ask your consulting firm to take on extra work that was outside of scope. Both of these client behaviors present a challenge for your consulting firm.

David A. Fields Consulting Group

A virtual board game to foster connection

Cozy Juicy Real

The virtual variation of the beloved storytelling and creativity tool Story Dice.

Dave Birss

A virtual check-in questions generator. Has 3 categories: Creative, reflective and practical

Daresay

Fortunately, brainstorming has a bright side: civilized ideating together. At least, this is how it appears in the books on creativity. So, can we make it real? Let’s talk about three methodologies I tried with colleagues.

Slava Shestopalov

MITRE’s Innovation Toolkit is a collection of proven and repeatable problem-solving methods to help you and your team do something different that makes a difference.

Mitre

It generates random, revealing, wonder-provoking questions and prompts. Helping you to bring joy, connection and a touch of magic to team meetings.

Abracademy

Conversation prompt generator

Dropbox design

FacilitatingXYZ (www.facilitating.xyz) is an online resource for ALL facilitators featuring videos, articles, books, and downloadables. The FacilitatingXYZ YouTube channel hosts all of our videos from short 1-minute videos to full-length (1hr+) long interviews.

Meg Bolger

Examples of activities for online and offline gatherings, and best practices

Chad Littlefield

Short educational videos on workshop design

AJ&Smart

An article outlining the building blocks for a great workshop design.

AJ&Smart

The 4C’s s framework is presented by the author as the structure that can be used “to design any type of workshop, regardless of the topic, length or outcome”. The method has the following 4 steps: Collect, Choose, Create and Commit.

AJ&Smart

A great source for activities for those working with generative practices, tackling complex transformation, sense-making, system design etc.

H3Uni

An online check-in and check-out questions generator.

Denk Werk

The Stoke Deck is a set of warm-up activities designed to boost energy, build connection, foster empathy, support collaboration, and cultivate creativity. Any time you need to stoke your team, click the button below to randomly select a new activity. Enjoy!

Taylor Cone

An online icebreaker questions generator based on several different topics.

Range

It’s a set of cards, also virtual, that can be used during workshops as a conversation starter, creativity session, idea generation hot start, or for reflection and personal development workshops.

Intuiti

A comprehensive facilitation guide.

Curiosity Society

Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

We've handpicked 25 bookmark-worthy frameworks and toolkits that you need to have at your fingertips. Find out why continuous learning is a game-changer for facilitators, and get ready to dive into these valuable resources!

Anamaria Dorgo

Tired of cringe-inducing icebreakers? We asked professional facilitators to share the virtual icebreakers they actually use to kick off their remote workshops.

Anamaria Dorgo

Looking for quick inspiration for sparking conversation and generating brilliant ideas in your next workshop? We saved you some time by rounding up the Butter Community’s favorite facilitation decks.

Anamaria Dorgo

Learn practical tips and get inspired to design and facilitate playful activities that help your teams be more effective.

Susanne Heiss

Do meaningful meetings, where everyone feels connected and heard, really exist? They can. But only if you plan for these typical meeting characters.

Friederike Abitz

Learn how to generate infinite points of inspiration for your next great idea.

Monica Fajardo

Learn how to get more participation during remote workshops with these simple workshop design tips.

Line Vestergaard & Theresa Lauritsen

Learn Romy Alexandra's top tips for building group rapport in remote settings to achieve the same level of connection in online sessions as you could in person.

Romy Alexandra

Learn how to host online networking events that people will never forget!

Ece Kurtaraner

A ButterMixer session hosted by Leo Chan on fostering psychological safety.

Butter Community

A short video of Rachel Davis hosting the Sunset Activity during one of her community sessions. This is a warm-up or hot start activity for ideation. If you want to run the same activity in your Butter session, here is the template Rachel created for us: https://templates.butter.us/template/the-sunset-activity

Rachel Davis

A short applied improvisation activity by Gary Ware for one of our Learning Playground event series.

Gary Ware

In this seIn this session, we’ll dive into the joyful side of brainstorming, and tackle actionable methodologies and tools to encourage more creative ideas – and get your team excited for them.

Rachel Davis

A ButterMixer hosted by Simon and Andy from KAOSPILOT about (learning) experience design and key elements.

Andy Sontag and Simon Kavanagh

A simple framework and 10 tools you can use in any variation to design your next workshop

Nathy Ravez

A framework to foster engagement in virtual sessions in a safe and natural way.

Jan Keck

A compilation of easy to use ways to integrate movement in virtual sessions.

Amy Luckey

How to use storytelling tactics to design your workshop

Steve Rowling

A great overview of the main archetypes and their needs, so that you can meet their expectations and avoid conflicts.

Andra Stefanescu

A framework to follow to design and host impactful and valuable meetings.

Douglas Ferguson

This article will take you step-by-step through the 5E model. Which is an Experience Design model that can be used to design meaningful services, events, or learning experiences. It will help you design and orchestrate experiences that deliver meaningful outcomes.

Andy Sontag

A method for unlocking student engagement and ownership of learning through packaging the pursuit of knowledge & creating a call to adventure... Learn how to design learning that unfolds and builds ownership, craft, talent, genius whilst sustaining the flow, transparency, challenge and impact.

Simon Kavanagh

At the core of every team is trust and it's incredibly important to build that foundation from the beginning. Watch this video to know how to build trust in a team so you can work efficiently together!

Chad Littlefield

When you're talking to someone you've never met, do you sometimes get the feeling that you instantly don't like them? That's understandable, especially if they're doing the things I'm talking about in this video! Watch this video to know the 5 common habits that make people instantly dislike you!

Chad Littlefield

—The role of a facilitator in groups —Understanding which stage a group is in —How to support a group to progress and develop into the next stage

Katharina Jacobi

Covers the Integrated Model of Group Development, aka. the 5-stages of group development by Susan Wheelan. It combines various theories, offers a comprehensive overview, and is always the first stop on our tour into group dynamics and group development.

Mischief Makers

This study provides general information about the studies on the groups and group dynamics.

Hüseyin Gençer

In this talk, Daria Vodopianova challenges us to question the way we see group interactions. Drawing on group dynamics techniques used by entrepreneurs, she encourages us to reinvent the way we coexist, in order to cultivate stronger self-development and motivation. Daria Vodopianova is a serial entrepreneur, startup mentor and author with a mission to empower people to surpass their potential.

Daria Vodopianova

A collection of activities to close your sessions

Butter

A good debriefing is more important than the activity itself. Use this deck of debriefing questions after your workshop or training activities, to deepen reflection and learning.

Butter

One of our favourite conversation format is the Fish Bowl, because: 1) it's suitable for large groups 2) it's focused but still dynamic 3) it's applicable both on and offline

Mischief Makers

Open Space Technology is particularly effective when no one knows the answer, and when a diverse group of people with different perspectives is required to find a solution.

Facilitator School

Drawing on seven integrated design principles, the World Café methodology is a simple, effective, and flexible format for hosting large group dialogue. Each element of the method has a specific purpose and corresponds to one or more of the design principles.

A dep dive into the listening triangle by Daniel Stillman

Daniel Stillman

One way to think about these components is as a fundamental conversation operating system (OS) with nine components.

Daniel Stillman

Meetings are experiences in the same way a digital product or service is an experience. And experiences have a clear architecture, that, once you see, it’s impossible to unsee. And once you see the components of an experience, you can shape them!

Daniel Stillman

11 principles for facilitating great conversations in almost any environment

Coaching for Leaders

Effective facilitation of a discussion involves the recognition and employment of different perspectives and different skills to create an inclusive environment. In order to do so, it is important to consider the features of effective discussions, and conditions that promote small group interaction and engagement. Discussion is a powerful mechanism for active learning; a well-facilitated discussion allows the participant to explore new ideas while recognizing and valuing the contributions of others.

The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning

A collection of simple and effective ways to bring movement into your virtual sessions

Butter