Honing in icebreakers
Service Design working group notes
If you heard of service design, you probably came across service blueprints. A blueprint is a birds-eye view of a service delivery. It displays in a structured way things like people activities, touchpoints for users, tech stuff and plenty more important information.
A blueprint is seen as the ultimate artefact of service designers. A canvas that articulates the ambition of an organisation to get things right and deliver a good service to its users. But like any other artefact, blueprints result from of a set of activities.
If a blueprint is the artefact, conversations are largely what enable service designers to get that done. There wouldn’t be any Mona Lisa without brush strokes, paint, a canvas and a lot of Leonardo’s mastery.
Service designers facilitate a lot of conversations (and do plenty more stuff). They help others — stakeholders, service delivery teams and users alike — to articulate thoughts to act upon them. A conversation is like a brush stroke, if you wish. A small act that helps service designers form the wider picture.
In today’s Service design session Brett took the group through facilitation techniques for icebreakers. Icebreakers are light but empowering group activities and we use them to loosen up the natural awkwardness of new teams coming together, as well as energise the room ahead of a group session. It’s like that first brush stroke on a blank canvas, it helps fighting off the… fear of the blank canvas.
Together we looked into four small workshop icebreakers, each with its own flavour aimed at addressing:
- Introducing a team to the process of analysing insights
- Pitching and voting
- Ideation and encouraging creativity
- Getting to know the team
Brett facilitated the session, timing each activity well and guiding the group through the exercises. After each one, we discussed as a group and collated feedback. It looked like this:
There are gazillion icebreakers available to choose from, for both remote and IRL settings, and for small and large groups. The essence is the same. Here’s my view:
- Short but punchy. Keep your icebreaker session short in the range of 5–10 minutes and the energy high! The outcome is to get the participants in the right mindset for collaborating, ignite and excite interest in the day, and give a taster of what’s coming up next in the workshop.
- Fun over seriousness. When new people meet, they tend to raise their defence mechanisms to establish a preferred image of themselves to others, but creativity needs lots of playfulness and little ego, so don’t be afraid to crack a joke and let the prompts guide you through humour and good vibes.
- Doing over thinking. Icebreakers help loosen up the vibes of a group session. Any workshop will have plenty occasions when to think through complex stuff and offer smart things to one another, so give your neurones a break and just be yourself.
Icebreakers are fun. They bring energy to the room and set the right conditions for teams to collaborate well in workshops and other group sessions. Service designers facilitate lots of conversations that are essential to any complex project. When you skim our discipline of the cerebral layer that sits on top of it — theories, frameworks and all that — what’s left is people collaborating well with one another, and the most natural and efficient medium is conversations.
Our Design Practice is growing. We’re a 70+ strong team of designers covering a wide range of design specialisms, from Service and Product Design to Brand Experience and Content Strategy. We’re organised in PoDs — People of Discipline and we meet regularly to grow our capabilities and advance our service offering.
Join us, we’ve got open roles across the board. Don’t see any roles up your street? Get in touch, we’re always keen to meet new talents!
