facilitation exercise: The round table fishbowl for group discussion

I have used this facilitation exercise in a few instances. Therefore I will describe it in this blog entry.

This exercise is great for keeping a focused conversation, while having a large group of people. At any time, only a few people have a conversation (the fish in the fishbowl). The remaining people are listeners (the ones watching the fishbowl). The caveat is that the listeners can join the discussion at any moment.

Here is how I ran it last time:

The round table had 4 chairs. One chair was kept empty, available for whoever wanted to join the conversation. When someone joined the table, someone else on the table (typically the one either sitting longer or less involved on the current conversation) would leave the table. The other participants were standing or sitting near the table. This is the roundtable-fishbowl style.

PM Dojo

The first PM Dojo! At least, it was the first PM Dojo I have heard about. For this reason, I want to share it.

Inspired by many Dojos our colleagues have been doing at Thoughtworks Brazil, we –PMs and BAs-- decided to give it a try.

Here are the slides we have used:

PM Dojo Thouhgtworks Brazil - 2011 April 27

The Dojo took one hour. It started with a quick overview, followed by a round table (fishbowl style), and a closing exercise.

The round table had 4 chairs. One chair was kept empty, available for whoever wanted to join the conversation. When someone joined the table, someone else on the table (typically the one either sitting longer or less involved on the current conversation) would leave the table. The other participants were standing or sitting near the table. This is the fishbowl style.

For the closing exercise, we used the ROI (Return on Investment) and Feedback exercise.

Basically I asked the participants to write down in a post-it feedback about the Dojo. Then, I told them to place the post-it on the ROI radar.

The ROI radar have a line going from very little ROI :( -- to very high ROI :) ++. The ROI question was:

For this last hour that you have spent here in this Dojo, how do you measure the return on your investment (of your time)? I am supper happy; this was really worthy my time: goes on top; the opposite goes on the bottom.

Below is the result from the ROI and Feedback exercise.

I left the Dojo with a good feeling. Now, I will check the feedback, chat with some of the 20+ folks that participated on it, and start thinking about the next one.