I have been in charge of icebreakers for our leadership offsite planning meetings for four years now. That’s four years, four meetings a year (we meet quarterly), for sixteen different icebreakers to open up the day-long meetings.
My boss asked me to do it in the beginning and now they’re just built into every agenda. And wow, I used to fret over them. I’d google icebreaker list after list and try to find the right one for a small group of people who generally already knew each other. These are short icebreakers too, ten minutes or less most of the time for a group of usually seven of us.
I’ve done pick a penny and then share a memory from your life from the year of the penny. I’ve done draw pictures on a shield outline for a different area of your life (but after that any drawing ice breaker got vetoed which is surprisingly limiting). Or simple ones like a Rose & Thorn (win and challenge) from the past year.
These days, fretting long gone, I mostly come up with them by walking around my apartment and seeking what I have around.
Like in our September meeting where I made everyone draw an Oracle card and we read the interpretation to each other. I did the same thing a while ago with Affirmator cards. At another, we did story dice and I made people roll and then come up with a memory from the different images like a weird Rarwshak test.
Today, I had planned to make everyone come up with a word to represent 2019 (I mean, I already had mine ready to go so it seemed easy enough), but changed my mind last minute before I left this morning, worried that people would struggle to come up with a word and wanting to give a little more low-pressure exercise for this meeting (where we had some new people and more people than usual). So I walked around my apartment, found my traveler’s Settlers of Catan game and pulled out one of the dice with a picture of a different resource. I came up with something you had to share if you rolled that resource (ex: grain = favorite holiday meal) and that was it. It took under five minutes. Sure, I could have used a regular die or a deck of cards (which I’ve done before), but it’s fun to switch things up, even a little bit.
The icebreaker was easy, low pressure, and well within the time constraints with most people rolling gold and sharing a professional accomplishment they were proud of from this year.
And it’s funny but these mini sharing games really do break the dice. They get everyone to talk right away at the meeting and slowing we learn more and more about each other. And my point is they are really easy to make up on the fly.
Although I’m pretty sure I’ve run out of random games now, but I don’t have to worry about it again until March.
With Love,
Natalie