Friend or Foe?
Friend or Foe? is an ideation warm-up exercise for relationship mapping: it helps participants build useful connections and understand how people, roles, or ideas relate.
How to run it
- Invite your players to a five minute stakeholder brainstorm, ask: Who are our project stakeholders? Ask them to consider teams and individuals both inside and outside your org or company. Have players write one stakeholder per sticky note.
- Once the brainstorm ends, have each player present their stakeholders by placing their sticky notes on a wall and provide to the group a brief description of their thinking.
- With all the sticky notes on the wall, ask the group to organize them into a rough org chart. This needs only to be an imprecise draft.
- To help with navigation, label all stakeholders.
- Denote future parts of the organizations (ones that are missing at the moment but are important to be considered for potential impact).
- Draw a border around the areas that are affected by the change/initiative or are in the focus of the analysis.
- Your whiteboard map could now look something like these:
- All methods All authors IAF Library Library Friend or Foe?
Run this exercise live
The facilitator console stays in this browser. Its QR handoff is a short-lived participant snapshot containing only public exercise instructions, phase, prompt, and timer state.
What participants need now
Materials:
This is a participant-safe snapshot, not a response form. It sends nothing back to the facilitator.
Prompts to use +
Invite your players to a five minute stakeholder brainstorm, ask: Who are our project stakeholders? Ask them to consider teams and individuals both inside and outside your org or company. Have players write one stakeholder per sticky note.
Once the brainstorm ends, have each player present their stakeholders by placing their sticky notes on a wall and provide to the group a brief description of their thinking.
With all the sticky notes on the wall, ask the group to organize them into a rough org chart. This needs only to be an imprecise draft.
Draw a border around the areas that are affected by the change/initiative or are in the focus of the analysis.
Your whiteboard map could now look something like these:
Run this with your AI assistant +
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.
Adapt this exercise for my exact room. Exercise: Friend or Foe?. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: Invite your players to a five minute stakeholder brainstorm, ask: Who are our project stakeholders? Ask them to consider teams and individuals both inside and outside your org or company. Have players write one stakeholder per sticky note.; Once the brainstorm ends, have each player present their stakeholders by placing their sticky notes on a wall and provide to the group a brief description of their thinking.; With all the sticky notes on the wall, ask the group to organize them into a rough org chart. This needs only to be an imprecise draft.; Draw a border around the areas that are affected by the change/initiative or are in the focus of the analysis.. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The strongest current observations come from Gamestorming; aggregators are listed as additional observations, not origin proof. (2 sources observed, including Gamestorming, SessionLab.)
- What that means: we track where an exercise has been observed in public sources. We do not claim to know who created it, or how popular it is.
- No efficacy claims: appearing in this library is not a claim that the exercise is proven effective. Facilitator judgment and context decide whether it works for a given room.
- Corrections: if you have evidence of an earlier or more accurate source, read our methodology and trust boundary and tell us.