My favourite icebreaker
This is a super fun activity to lighten the mood and act as a quick and simple icebreaker.
It’s perfect for sessions where you’ll be asking participants to do some drawing or storyboarding at some stage (as it loosens up the fear of drawing!). For a creative session, it’s also great to use straight after my favourite creative warm-up.
That said, I’ve used it in all sorts of situations — creative workshops, team meetings, leadership away days — and it works amazingly well every time.
What you need:
A Sharpie and post-it pad for each person. Or if you’re not a weird sharpie obsessive like me, just a blank sheet of paper and a pencil or pen for each person does the trick.
Instructions:
Get everyone into pairs, ideally with someone they don’t know.
If you’ve got a big workshop group, you can get everyone facing each other in two lines for ease (like a line-dance!).
Ask them to stare into each others eyes, and start drawing a portrait of their face without looking at the page.
No breaking gaze (and absolutely no looking at the picture they’re drawing).
Give them 2–3 mins before you ask them to sign their partners portrait and give it to them as a present.
Ask a few people to share their portraits, as there’s sure to be some hilarious ones in there ☺
Enjoy!
Shout out to Ellen, who used to work in my team (now in the amazing Action for Children innovation team), for introducing me this one to me.
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