The Secret Ingredient you did not know you needed for your Workshops.
Discover how to create powerful moments that will boost worshop partcipant’s creativity and performance.
The secret to boosting your team’s creativity lies in icebreakers! I know what you are thinking, “seriously, icebreakers…?!”. We all have this memory of a boring meeting or training with people we don’t know, and the facilitator pulls up an icebreaker that makes the situation feel even more awkward.
Yes, icebreakers can be awkward, but they don’t have to be. You just need to choose the right ones and use them at the right moment.
How I met … Icebreakers 😍
To be honest, I used to be the kind of person that would make jokes about icebreakers, but I totally changed my opinion since the pandemic.
When you have a workshop in person, there are plenty of moments to socialize, either before the session or during the breaks. These particular moments give the group the time and the opportunity to connect between each other.
When conducting a workshop remotely, however, it’s another story. I am sure you have noticed that it is way more difficult to “connect”. This is why I started integrating icebreakers in my workshops. I quickly realized the impact it can have on the team dynamic as well as on the outputs of the workshops. I now use them in all of my workshops, both the physical and the remote ones.
Workshops are powerful because people leave these sessions feeling like they have created something together. By working together towards a common goal, understanding how we found those solutions, and knowing why we made certain decisions, the team feels more cohesive. As a result, team members are motivated to move forward and take the next steps.
Hence, why icebreakers are important, and more so in remote workshops. They may feel awkward at first, but they do help enhance human relationships. By using icebreakers, you create unique bonding experiences for the participants and the group will definitely capitalize on this through the workshops.
Icebreakers can really make the difference and this is not only based on my personal opinion.
Icebreakers can help increase team’s bonds, boost performance and creativity— Harvard Business School study
Experiment 1 🤳
Michael Norton, Professor at Harvard, gathered 221 participants and asked them to form groups of 2 to 4 people to perform a certain exercise. The participants needed to run around the campus to take selfies in front of specific locations. They had 45 minutes to complete the challenge and the winners would receive a cash prize.
But, there was a catch, the professor asked half the groups to use an icebreaker and the other half needed to read an article in silence.
The icebreaker-groups had to form a circle, perform a series of rhythmic claps and foot stomps and yell, “Let’s go!”.
The results were clear: the teams that used the icebreaker outperformed the other teams. They got the most selfies, had the shortest completion times, and reported liking each other more in the post-event survey.
Experiment 2 💡
The same Harvard Professor, Michael Norton, asked hundreds of people to brainstorm how many uses they could find for an object.
In this experiment, all participants had to use an icebreaker where they would roll the dice and wave arms in pattern. Some people had to perform the actions while sitting alone in a cubicle, while others did it as a group. The results showed that performing the dice-and-wave routine in a group increased the team’s creativity and led members to like each other more.
Now that I have convinced you to integrate icebreakers in your workshops, how can you choose the right one to avoid those feared awkward moments?
My top 3 go-to icebreakers 🍦🔨
1️⃣ Worst job 😩
- Ask everyone to write down their names, the worst job they have ever had, and the most important lesson they learned from it.
- Give 2 minutes to each participant to comment.
2️⃣ Two truths one lie 🤥
- Ask participants to write down their names, two true facts about themselves and one believable lie.
- The group votes or discusses which statements are true and which one is a fib.
- Give 2 minutes to the participant to comment his facts.
👉 This one is even nicer to use on day 2 of the workshops, considering the team already knows each other better.
3️⃣ Your 3 favorites emojis 😍
- Ask everyone to write down their names, and to draw their 3 favorite emojis.
- Give 2 minutes to each participant to explain why those emojis are their favorite.
👉 This one’s Jackie Colburn’s idea! Thanks, Jackie. For those of you who don’t know her yet, she writes a lot of interestig stuff about facilitation.
Break the ice. Workshop. Deliver awesome work 🔁
To make a long story short, icebreakers are an amazing tool to remove barriers, promote harmony and create a sense of cohesiveness among your workshops participants. Integrate them in your workshops, choose them wisely, and the group will perform better as well as leave with a nice memory of your workshop.
Individuals typically remember both the beginning and end of a memory better due to serial position effects, such as primacy bias and recency bias. Recency bias is a cognitive bias that causes individuals to more easily remember something that has happened recently. The peak-end rule is influenced by this bias, which is why we remember both the peak emotional moments and the end.
To conclude, remember you need your workshop to start strong, but it can be complicated to start on the problem right from the get go. So, pick the right icebreaker, and you will energize the group as well as be ready to tackle the first exercise of your workshop.
Small tip — Here’s something I do when I’m presenting the end deliverable of a design sprint or any projects to a client: I finish with a fun slide in which I present what we learned from the icebreakers/fun moments. It allows the client to remember that we have accomplished a lot of work and on top of that, that the journey to get there was still pleasant.
