A fast-paced collaborative thinking activity.

Purpose

Gather information, ideas and insights from a group efficiently and turn it into usable advice.

Especially valuable when you have multiple areas to explore and limited time. Good switching between generation and prioritisation.

Instructions
People rotate between a number of different themed stations and build up collective insight on each topic.

Can be used purely to generate insight and ideas, or half way through it can shift to prioritising and offering practical suggestions.

In Full Circle groups go round all the stations and then return to their original station to review and share back. The alternative version serves as an advice process by switching from generation and exploration to prioritisation.

Room Set Up

• 6 stations set up around the room

• Each station has a prompt, usually in the form of a question or an action. Some common prompts include: challenges, opportunities, assets, solutions to amplify, limiting beliefs, from>to, offers of help and framestorming.

• Each station has a flip chart sheet/tapestry paper or sticky notes to capture the conversation (variety helps)

• Enough space for groups of 5–6 people at each station

• 4 or 5 stations (more gets boring) and an equal number of rounds

• For larger groups (40 to 75 people) create two separate ecosystems of stations

Rounds 1–3: Explore & Generate

• Each participant chooses a topic they’re drawn to and joins that station.

• Small groups discuss and contribute to the station prompt (write, draw, note ideas).

• After 5-10 minutes, signal to rotate.

• Free movement each round to form new groups, or groups rotate clockwise to the next station.

• In each round, read what’s already been written, and continue building on it.

Rounds 4–5: Prioritise & Advise

Three rounds will generate a lot of content to work with so in this variant of Full Circle, the task now is to work with what’s already there. 

Options include asking groups to:

• Identify key themes
• Highlight what’s most important
• Cluster, rank or dote vote on sticky notes
• Offer next steps, questions, or suggestions

Debrief / Report Back
Let participants wander and browse the outputs before closing. Note the effective collective work.

A break after this activity is usually the best form of sharing activity, or you can ask people share highlights from their final station (personally I tend to avoid this – or make it very brief and high level).

Benefits

• Shared ownership of complex topics

• Makes ideas visible and builds momentum

• Encourages a mix of divergent and convergent thinking

• Builds a sense of collective intelligence and movement

Riffs and Variations

• Fewer stations, more rounds

• Each station has a host who stays in place

• Use post-it notes instead of large paper to allow easier clustering and movement of idea