Facilitator Toolkit : Breakout Tools

Breakout Sessions

Tips for Facilitating Breakouts

The majority of detailed thinking and creativity will occur during the breakout sessions, so think of these sessions as the central operating mechanism of your collaborative workshop.

As a facilitator, it is your duty to organize tools and activities to evoke creativity and detailed thinking from your participants: this is key to tackling complex problems. Creativity has long been seen as a trait: people either have it or they don’t.  But in reality, those labeled as “creative” often employ simple strategies and practices to get where they want to go.  These strategies are tools for examining things deeply, exploring new ideas, performing experiments, and testing hypotheses to generate new and surprising insights and results.  You will find these tools on the pages that follow. 

The tools are classified based on their purpose: for general use, diverging, emerging, or converging.  The majority of these games were pulled from the book “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers” by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo.  You can find this book in the RMI library, it contains additional activities and tips than the ones found here.

• Core games: games or tools that work well in any situation and often show up as a small part within other activities.
• Games for diverging: when facing a blank space, or a situation in which you can’t quite define the problem, the most difficult step to take can be the first one.  These games are designed to help you frame and describe your problem so that you can then jump into solving.  
• Games for emerging: these games make and break patterns, they help you navigate, combine, and interpret ideas, which ultimately enables new ideas to emerge in surprising ways.  
• Games for converging: converging games are not only designed to find the endpoint and define the end goals, but also to create the commitment and alignment that lead to the next step.  Only problems that are well opened and well explored will lead to a decisive closing.  

Consult these activities when planning breakout session content and remember that the participant mix within each group can be critical to success.   

GATHER uses a similar approach but structures the flow of activities through six distinct stages rather than three: connection, shared language, divergence, co-creation, convergence, and commitment.  They include suggested activities for each of these stages and tips for designing your own activities.  

These tips, or essentials, pulled from “Gamestorming,” will help you work your way through nearly any challenge you’re likely to encounter while facilitating these game based methods for generating creativity and solving complex problems.

• Opening and Closing: In opening, the goal is to get people thinking and to spark their imaginations to explore even the wildest, most innovative possibilities.  Closing is about making choices and decisions, bringing things to a conclusion and moving toward doing rather than thinking.
• Don’t open and close at the same time: You don’t want to use the critical part of your mind while exploring innovative ideas and you don’t wnt to be creative while trying to make difficult choices.
• Close everything you open: Opening a big world of possible solutions can be overwhelming if you don’t subsequently close and narrow down the list to the most important opportunity (or opportunities).  

• Fire starting: Sparking the imagination.  Questions are among the most powerful fire-starting techniques.  By framing a question carefully you can inspire the thought, reflection, emotion, and sensation that will lead to desired results.

• Artifacts: In charrettes, an artifact is any tangible, portable object that holds information -- a post-it, for example.  By recording and displaying the ideas that are being generated in a visual/tangible/manipulable fashion, your participant’s minds remain free to engage with that knowledge in a way that produces insights and connections beyond the obvious.  

• Node generation: Nodes are anything seen as part of a larger system.  When creating artifacts, you will usually be thinking of them as elements in something larger -- nodes.  Node generating exercises stimulate the creation of as many nodes as possible, from which you will later be able to shuffle, sort, reorganize, and prioritize.  In opening an inquiry, view things from as wide an angle as possible to give yourself more content to work with later on.

• Meaningful space: A meaningful space can be created anywhere: a whiteboard, flip chart, tabletop, etc.  This is a framing tool (that can take many shapes) to make relationships within a space more meaningful, and will help find common themes within nodes.  

• Sketching and model making: Your participants may feel most comfortable in conveying their thoughts verbally or in writing, but narrowing themselves to one channel of communication can put a limit on creative thinking.  In helping participants feel comfortable in expressing ideas visually or symbolically (be it a sketch or a skit or a sculpture made of LEGO Blocks), you are helping them break into a new way of thinking that may spur exciting possibilities.  

• Randomness, Reversal, and Reframing: Once we find a pattern, it’s difficult to see anything else.  Randomness is a way of fooling the mind so that you can more easily search for new patterns in familiar domains.  Shuffle, reverse, re-sort, and rearrange the modular artifacts your participants have created to generate new patterns and ideas.  

• Improvisation: By improvising -- creating in the moment and responding intuitively to the environment -- you let go of assumptions and biases and open yourself to new ideas.  It’s a way of thinking with your body that allows you to experience things from a fresh perspective.

• Selection: Your participants will likely generate too many options to pursue during the opening stages of a session.  With too many possibilities to pursue, participants can easily become overwhelmed, and nothing gets accomplished in the end.  Voting on ideas or arranging ideas based on priority can help participants see where everybody stands and move to decisions more quickly.

• Try something new: Try something new every time you facilitate a game (or a workshop, for that matter).  You won’t discover anything new unless you take risks, this will help you continuously develop and improve your skills while evoking creativity and innovation from participants.