The ‘yes, but’ ‘yes, and’ Icebreaker

A way to get creativity flowing and warm up a Scrum Event

Published in

Serious Scrum

3 min readApr 17, 2019

The rhythm of Scrum can be relentless. Repetition can lead to scrum events becoming more like rituals or — dare I say it — ceremonies. Ugh.

Scrum Masters need icebreakers in their arsenal to add much needed energy and focus to rooms and help make these meetings more like… well, events!

Preparation

Not much needed. No materials required. This could be run at the start of any meeting with 6 or more people. Takes around 5–10 minutes.

Round 1 — “Yes, but…”

Ask the people in the room to pair up.
The task for each pair is to attempt to make a hypothetical dinner plan together.
Each person takes a turn at saying one sentence, and then it is the next person’s turn.
The first sentence must be: “would you like to go for dinner this evening?”
Every subsequent sentence must start with “yes, but…”
Set a timer for two minutes, confirm the rules are understood, and go.
After the two minutes are up, ask an open question to the room: “how did that feel?” and wait for answers. Depending on the group, you should get one or two responses at least.
Ask for a show of hands to see who actually managed to make plans.

Round 2 — “Yes, and…”

Same rules as the first round, except for one change: after the first sentence, every subsequent sentence starts with “yes, and…”

Timer for two minutes, and start the room off.
You should notice a difference after a short period of time.
After the two minutes are up, ask an open question to the room: “how did it feel that time?” and wait for answers.
Ask for a show of hands to see who managed to make plans this time: there should be more success this time.
Depending on the feedback, you might also want to ask “what was different this time?”

Wrap-up

The point of the exercise is to reinforce that every time someone communicates with you, it is an offer, and presents you with a choice.

We can accept the offer and try to build on it (yes, and…) or we can reject the offer, and close down the possibilities of building on the idea (yes, but…).

Sometimes we’re not aware of how open or closed we are to building on ideas. The working day is busy, and can move at a hundred miles an hour. Exercises like this can help us to zone in and focus before starting some group task.

And it’s also a little bit of fun…