Icebreakers! Don’t you love them? Those ‘fun’ activities that are supposed to warm up a group on a training course and help them get to know each other?
Well, not always. I know I’ve been on courses where an icebreaker has actually had the opposite effect, depending on the culture of the company, the emotional state each participant comes in with, or the personalities of the participants.
Some people will be impatient to get to the material, or back to work, and regard any icebreaker as a waste of their time, not least because it’s irrelevant to what they are there to learn. Others may feel exposed by the nature of what they’re required to do, whether through performance anxiety or just through having the spotlight turned on them.
The ‘Name Toss’, where you stand in a circle, everyone says their name, then you throw a ball or bean bag to someone while saying their name. Loads of possibilities here for fumbling the catch, or worse still the throw. Double points if you’re not great at remembering names!
Or what about the ‘Tell Us Something About Yourself That Nobody Knows’? Hello introverts, you’ll love this one!
But there are are some icebreakers that can help groups to feel more bonded, ease them into ‘Default’ or empathic mode so they’re open to new ideas and more trusting of others in the group, and will be relevant to the subject of the course.
The one I use most often is a cut-down version of the appreciative interview that’s the mainstay of the Appreciative Inquiry approach. It works like this:
Ask the participants to pair up, ideally with someone they don’t know (or don’t know well if they work in the same place), and take five minutes each way to interview each other about “What’s been your best experience of…” – whatever the course is about. So if it’s a project management course, “What’s been your best experience of a well-managed project?”
Talking about good experiences helps people to relax and open up – still more so when the ‘interviewer’ finds that some of the interviewee’s experiences resonate with them, or is moved by their passion.
I brief my participants that we’re looking for a story here, rather than bullet points or detached analysis, and that you’ll know when you’re doing a good interview when you see your interviewee lose themselves in the story, reliving the good experience and feeling some of the same positive emotions they felt at the time.
As the exercise progresses, you’ll probably feel the atmosphere in the room change, as people open up to each other. At the end of the process, participants will feel like they’ve got to know at least one other person better than when they came in.
But what, you might ask, if the course topic is dry and technical, so it’s unlikely that participants will have had any peak experiences with it? Like ‘Pneumatic Conveying of Bulk Solids for Chemical Engineers’, to take a random example I found on the web.
You can still use this warm-up, by choosing a subject that’s more general. My go-to in this situation would be “Tell me about one of the best experiences of your professional life.” It’s still relevant to their job and career and, because it gives them a wider field of experiences to choose from, is actually even more likely to help them open up and reassure even the more ‘junior’ participants that actually they do have a lot to offer and don’t have to feel judged by the other people in the room. (Here’s an article expanding on how to use appreciative interviews when the topic is dry or technical),
Does this feel like something you could use? Alternatively, what’s the worst icebreaker you’ve ever been put through?
Photo by Tirachard Kumtanom from Pexels
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“This is a great how-to book on using Appreciative Inquiry. Andy does an excellent job weaving the what, how, and why into a step-by-step guide that is sure to deepen your understanding and practical ability to successfully apply the Appreciative Inquiry 5D methodology for teams and organizations.”– Cheri Torres, co-author of Conversations Worth Having
