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Ten questions that change a debrief

The activity is the delivery mechanism. The debrief is the product. Run a game, skip the ten minutes afterwards, and you have run an icebreaker.

This is the sheet facilitators keep in front of them: one opening question for each of the ten teamwork topics, written to be said out loud exactly as written.

  • Ten questions, ten topics: from role clarity to speaking up to what happened to the disagreement.
  • The ten-minute structure: one minute framing, seven minutes them, two minutes you, one minute on who does what next.
  • Five questions that close a room down, each with the rewrite that asks the same thing without the trapdoor.
  • Free to print and pass around, including inside your own training pack.

Structured debriefs improve performance by around 25%, across 46 samples and 2,136 participants, and the effect held for teams and individuals in both simulated and real settings. Tannenbaum & Cerasoli (2013), Human Factors 55(1), 231–245.