Timeline of Events

Teams may create a timeline of events together in a meeting as a sense-making exercise that helps everyone understand both what happened to lead to the current situation, learn aspects of the situation that may have been known only by some group members, and see how other people remember each event. To create a timeline, the facilitator adds one or two key events on a horizontal line. For example, they may add a project start date at one end and the current date at the other. Then, participants add other important events and organize them sequentially. There are several techniques which build from the creation of a timeline, such as the Peaks and Valleys exercise used in project retrospectives and the Future-Backward exercise used to highlight the differing perspectives of individual interest groups.