don’t break the ice; map the caps
Many of us have learned to cringe when we see the faintest signal that an icebreaker is coming. For some, this is one of the worst things that happens at work. You’re embarrassed; what’s worse, you’re uselessly embarrassed. You have to do something awkward or revealing but so often it doesn’t actually build a relationship or break down a barrier. It just makes you resent the leader who forces you to do it.
I’m the kind of nerd with a little improv/theater kid inside who actually likes icebreakers, so when I’m in charge I have to be careful. If I’m going to have folks take on some social discomfort, I want it to be useful. I have to think like a designer; there should be a point.
One exercise I’ve found to be quite good for this is in the cheesily-titled and enduringly useful Discover Your True North Fieldbook. The premise is simple: you split your life story into chapters with titles. To do this, you turn a sheet of paper sideways, landscape orientation, and draw a timeline of your life, from birth to present. Then you add in major events and group them into 4-6 chapters that you give titles. In a more detailed version, you add a few bullet points to each chapter that indicate what was most important to you during that chapter, what took most of your time and attention, which value of yours was most at play or in question.
With a group, I split folks into pairs and have them share their timelines with each other chapter by chapter. Usually, I give ~15 mins for the telling of the tale and another ~10 mins for Q+A. Then repeat, with the other partner as the storyteller. If you do this thoroughly, it takes an hour.
Obviously, the typical icebreaker is much shorter than this. But I have found it’s worth trading in a month’s worth of weak, cringey icebreakers for one run of the Life Story in Chapters. With this one, you’re mapping the ice caps and making sense of them, not just trying to break them with one clumsy hammer.
You actually get to know someone in a pretty holistic way and they have control over how deep or superficial their revelations are. Doing the exercise usually teaches me something useful about myself, too.
-eric
