By
Clare on
June 10, 2012
Photo Credit: Interact Egypt - Play Innovation
A couple of weeks ago, my friend and fellow TEDxCanberra organiser, Gavin, asked me to suggest some icebreaker activities for an upcoming planning day he was helping to organise. This was my off-the-top-of-my-head response…
- One of the easy ones I like is to go around the room and ask everyone to share something interesting about their name. It’s easy and surprising how much you learn about others.
- For something more interactive, the marshmallow challenge is fun but takes time and some equipment.
- As a creativity warmup you could do the circles challenge (Tim Brown talks about it in his talk from the Serious Play conference on TED.com). You can read about the exercise and download the sheets with the printed cirlces here.
- DIY name-tags? Where they have to make a name tag that not only says their name but has an icon/picture on it that represents something (their role in the team, branch, organisation for example).
- Or a rock-paper-scissors tournament… this gets loud, but is lots of fun…. Everyone pairs up and plays a game of rock-paper-scissors (can be a single game or best of three). The winner progresses to the next round and plays another winner, while the loser becomes the biggest fan of whoever defeated them. They have to cheer and clap and rev up their winner. And so it continues on and on, until you have two people playing off against each other backed by two big teams of supporters.
- Everyone has to line up in order of birthday (1 Jan at one end to 31 Dec at the other) without talking. You could also do variants of this…. middle name by alpha order, length of service in the organisation….
- Another question that is kind of cool to ask is ‘If you were going to make a documentary, what would it be about?’. I’ve done planning days where I get people to write their documentary topic on another nametag and wear it for the day. That way it can continue to be used as an icebreaker throughout the day, during breaks etc.
What are your favourite icebreakers?
By
Clare on
April 25, 2012
A quick post (I’ve been putting it off for too long!) to share some observations, learnings and reflections from recently facilitating the Stanford Institute of Design‘s (the d.school) ‘gift-giving project‘ with a group of colleagues in the Australian Public Service.
I think that this session provides a fantastic, fun taster of what design thinking is all about and why building empathy, prototyping, seeking feedback and iterating are critical to reaching good design outcomes. But perhaps more importantly what I love about this course is that it helps people to uncover (or discover?) their own creative potential. People walk into the course thinking ‘I’m not a designer’, ‘I can’t draw’, ‘I’m not creative’, but through the course they do design, draw and generate creative solutions.
The d.school make it super easy for facilitators by providing them with pretty much all of the materials you need for the course – facilitator guide, participant worksheets, and post-course handouts (which you can download and use for free under the CC BY-NC-SA licence here) . Note – the recently released virtual crash course makes it even easier as they effectively provide the facilitator too! (more…)
By
Clare on
December 18, 2010
Gamestorming by Dave Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a really great resource to have on your bookshelf. It describes a series of different facilitation techniques/exercises or ‘games’ that can be used in a range of different organisational settings. While I was familiar with many of the games (or some variant of the games) but it is great to have them described in a single book. It was enjoyable to read the book cover-to-cover, but it’s more of a reference book that you’d keep on your self and refer to when facilitating meetings/workshops to get some ideas about certain techniques to use.
Experienced facilitators may find that they already have several of the games in their existing ‘toolkit’, but it is a useful reference source for stimulating new ideas.
