Workshop activities
Thousands of workshop exercises exist. According to the Nielsen Norman group, at the core of all these exercises are the same 7 foundational activities:
- Postup: An activity where participants individually generate content on sticky notes, then post them up on a wall. Contributions are then discussed, captured, and shared.
- Affinity diagramming: Clustering information, often sticky notes, into relational groups based on similarities or themes.
- Landscape mapping: Arranging groups of similar content into a preassigned structure — for example, a customer-journey map.
- Forced ranking: A prioritization activity where participants rank items as a group to create a strict order.
- Storyboarding: Creating a storyboard that communicates a story through images displayed in a sequence of panels. It chronologically maps the story’s main events.
- Role-playing: Acting out another perspective (e.g., user) or system (a set of known information or data) as a technique for exploration and discovery.
- Playback: Sharing the progress, process, or insights gained by an individual to the group.
You can combine, mix, and remix these fundamental activities to create almost any exercise needed. As a facilitator, these core activities should be familiar tools in your back pocket.[1]
