Contrasting Ethical Dilemmas Exercise
This exercise facilitates discussion of ethical dilemmas. In most job, some decisions are not straight forward to make because one clear choice comes with certain ethical issues. The question then ...
Convergent vs Divergent Thinking Exercise
A useful distinction in thinking process was suggested by Joy Paul Guilford in 1967. Guilford coined convergent thinking in contrast with divergent thinking. With convergent thinking, you are tryin...
Fishbowl Conversation Technique
The fishbowl technique can be used to organise constructive discussions on a given topic. In a nutshell, the technique helps people manage a debate on the topic and keep it under control even if ma...
Teach Why Groups Can Take Too Much Risk While Making Decisions
Is there a difference between people making decisions in groups and individually in respect to the amount of risk they take? To investigate, James Stoner, who was a MIT graduate in 1960s, carried o...
Suppose there is a team meeting and the group is going to discuss the issues associated with a topic, design something or a solve a problem. For any given complex problem, there are a variety of pe...
Diamond Ranking for Decision Making
When making decisions, you often need to choose between a series of options. When told to rank options, people sometimes want to give the same rank to multiple options. In some cases, it might be m...
What Are the Basic Principles of Memory
This is a fantastic exercise in teaching a number of important topics related to memory and retention. The exercise is actually rather simple—going through a list of words and recalling what has be...
Training Technique: Combined Ranking
When delivering training courses, sometimes you need to get the delegates go through an exercise that involves sorting cards. Card sorting is a training activity where you get the delegates to thin...
Pluses, Potentials and Concerns
This is a decision making exercise that allows you to choose the best ideas from a set of ideas. Since each idea is considered in detail, this technique is more useful when you can focus enough on ...
Idea Selection Exercise: The ATAR Technique
The ATAR acronym stands for Awareness, Trial, Availability, Repeat. It is a technique used to filter through ideas based on a number of criteria. It can be used to understand customers’ perception ...
Decision Making: The NAF Technique
A particularly useful technique in brainstorming and decision making is the NAF technique. The acronym stands for New, Appeal and Feasibility. It is basically a simple way to score ideas to see if ...
Teambuilding Exercise: Handle Toxic Waste
In this team building exercise, the group must work together to handle toxic waste symbolised by an object. Many areas can be explored in this exercise including leadership, problem solving, teamwo...
Words can sometimes limit creativity. Humans are generally very visual and have evolved to sense the world primarily thorough focused looking and observation. As a result, a large part of the brain...
Handout: Problem Solving Questions
The following is a series of questions presented under a number of categories that help to analyse a given problem. The set of questions can be used in a handout for people who want to explore a gi...
Brainstorming Exercise: Dialectic Inquiry
Sometimes it is important to scrutinise a plan to make sure it is valid. A common method used is known as Devil’s Advocate. This is basically an individual who has been given the role of an adverse...
Bullet Proofing Your Ideas: What Can Possibly Go Wrong?
Most brainstorming sessions revolve around problem solving and coming up with new solutions. This is useful in generating ideas, though it does not provide many opportunities to find out what happe...
Crisis Management: Brainstorm a Solution
This exercise combines crisis management and brainstorming. You can use it as a template for a series of exercises on problem solving using different methods depending on what you are covering in y...
Goal Setting Exercise: Challenge Assumptions
Sometimes we take things for granted. We assume certain conditions are true and remain true until it is too late. This happens often in industries that evolve very quickly or markets that change ra...
