Bureaucrat, administrator, trusted
370
edits
Changes
no edit summary
Sometimes a good icebreaker can be as simple as answering a good an interesting question or prompt. If the goal is to get people warmed-up, talking, laughing and having fun... sometimes that's may be all it takes.
===Objectives===
===Group Size===
===Set Up===
===Directions===
For a live group, the facilitator picks a question one or prompt more questions (prompts) and asks people to pair up and share with their answer with their partner.
For an online community, ask people to post their answers to a community forum or message board.
[http://www.Plinky.com Plinky] is a service/community that you can subscribe to. It will send you good questions & prompts everyday. You can also browse/search [http://www.plinky.com/prompts their archives].
Here's are a sample samples of some of their its prompts that would make great icebreaker questions for the start of your next meeting:
* Paul Simon was going to Graceland, Toto blessed the rains down in Africa – what place would you write a song about? Explain why it's worthy of song.
* If you were named based on your traits, habits, or likes, what would your name be? One of our engineers, "Orders Lots of Stuff From Amazon," wants to know.
* Describe the greatest put-on you've witnessed (or seen on TV), and why it stuck with you.
Note: Plinky has gives many of questions about relationships, which may not be appropriate for your group. E.g. "What's the worst way you've ever dumped or been dumped by someone?" is probably not a good way to start your next staff meeting, so use your discretion. Also, the better you can relate the questions to the content of your team's regular activities, meeting or training (even if you don't reveal to the participants how it's related until after the activity) , the more it will may help build your community.
===Debrief===
If you are doing this live, after you give people a chance to talk in pairs, you can ask a few volunteers to share with the larger group.
If you have selected questions relevant to the team's regular activities, discuss what has been learned from the answers.
===Alternatives===
Similar to [[Would you rather%3F]]
Once you get the Plinky idea, invent your own questions.
[[Category:New Activities]]
