Typically when people come together for an activity such as a meeting or a workshop, they are a bit anxious. They are filled with questions. What’s going to happen here today? What will I need to do? Will I be able to perform adequately? Will people like me?

Not only are they anxious, they are also preoccupied. They’re thinking about children at day care, work projects, or errands that will be run after work. If you are looking for some creativity from the group, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any.

Icebreakers cut through both of these distractions. They help people forget about their anxiousness and preoccupations, allowing them to focus on the task at hand.

Icebreakers come in many flavors. Some are focused on helping people quickly and easily become acquainted with one another. Others present the participants with a challenging activity that requires their full attention. Still others are just plain fun, giving people a chance to laugh and smile.

Here’s a simple icebreaker for your next meeting. It’s perfect for a group that knows each other by name, but knows little else. Give everybody a 3×5-index card. Ask each person to write down his or her favorite animal, color, food, and foreign country. Collect the cards, mix them, and then read them aloud to the group. After each card is read, ask people to write down their guess about the person that wrote the card. To add a little spark of fun, you might award a prize to the person who correctly identifies the most card authors.

People sometimes skip icebreakers because they want to immediately get down to business. A 5-10 minute icebreaker investment is never a waste of time. It’s a great first step on the road to a productive and creative session.

Board Room Bingo

If you are looking for a quick way to get people networking and communicating with everyone in a meeting room in a short space of time then this is a great way to do it!

A few days before your meeting/conference takes place send out an email to all delegates and ask them to reply by stating 2 or 3 bullet points about them self that maybe slightly humorous or have played a major part in their life. You can either use all the replies or select as many as you think dependent on numbers.

The whole idea of this ice breaker is to get people to network in your conference or meeting room and find the relevant person that matches the bullet point descriptions. Now comes the fun part, relating this to a game of Bingo! Create a grid as in a bingo card for all delegates to carry around that includes numbers that correspond to the bullet points. As your guests move around the room they will gradually start to complete their Bingo card and as in the real game as soon as someone completes a straight row horizontally, vertically or diagonally they have to shout Bingo!!

Try and supply some small prizes for the Boardroom Bingo winners as an incentive to get them involved, normally 1 for each winning line and obviously the big full house!

This exercise should normally take no more than 20 to 30 minutes max.

The Helium Stick

This is a great simple but very effective exercise that should last around 20 minutes if performed correctly – You should aim to have around 10 people per team.

The basic exercise requires all team members to:

Support a long stick or tube with each person using one finger. The stick must then be lowered to the ground with no fingers losing contact with the tube.

The tendency is for the stick to rise, (keep it to yourself but the stick doesn’t really contain Helium!!) this is because the collective force used to keep fingers in contact with the stick is greater than the gravitational force (weight) of the stick. For this reason use a stick for the exercise that is light enough for this effect to occur, given the number of people in the team. For example a broomstick is too heavy for a team of three people, but would be fine for a team of ten.

Rules and guidelines:

Team members must be positioned either on one or both sides of the stick -

Start with the stick at about chest height and instruct the team to rest it on top of their finger nails.

If any team member removes their finger or the stick is dropped the exercise must be started again.

Try and get individuals to use a finger from both hands (this will increase the lifting motion and have a more effective result)

The facilitator should clarify at which point the stick is deemed to be touching the ground.

Try and keep teams as big as possible as this will lengthen the amount of time in which the activity can take place and obviously will have an impact on the end result!

Keep a close eye on any cheats with their fingers not correctly positioned!

Change teams around to ensure individuals get to work with others.

What’s the point?

Once you have completed the ice breaker carry out a short debrief to see how teams and individuals tackled the effect of the rising stick and what was done to overcome this. You will find that some teams worked a lot better than others! There are loads of great team building ideas out there for your next meeting or conference and they can be very beneficial and effective when chosen correctly.

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