There are times when a trainer or facilitator ask me for an ‘icebreaker’ and it makes me shudder. I’ve seen some great training delivery in my time – and I’ve sat through some pretty awful sessions too. I think most learners have made up their minds about what a session is going to be like after the first few minutes and that decision is often made on the basis of the introductory activity – or lack of it.  So I’m quite prepared to stand on my soapbox and claim that getting your introductory activities right is a crucial part of your learning design process. Any old ‘icebreaker’ just won’t do!

Face-to-face time in learning is becoming increasingly precious. Yet very often, the process of introducing the course, the participants and ‘breaking the ice’ takes a disproportionate amount of time and doesn’t add value or move towards the learning objectives. And I’m sure we’ve all sat through the lengthy ’round table introductions’ that we could have done informally in a few minutes if we’d had the opportunity to get up and move! So here’s the challenge – find a means of introducing yourself and the group that delivers new insights and learning and ‘tunes people in’ to the core content of your training session.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Use what I call ‘people bingo’. Create a grid of 25 squares. In each one, write a statement about something that it would be genuinely useful to know eg. ‘Someone who is currently working on Project X’, ‘Someone who has experience of Y,’ ‘Someone who has experience of working with a competitor’, ‘Someone who has qualification Z’. Choose things relevant to your group and objectives. Give everyone a copy of the grid – the ‘bingo’ sheet – and give them 10 minutes to circulate and collect as many different signatures in the boxes as they can. They’ll need to talk to each other!!

2. Use imagery. RSVP Design’s ‘Images of Organisations’ and ‘Images of Customer Service’ are great examples of how carefully selected images can generate useful and relevant early discussion and focus people on the theme of the training or to benchmark how they are feeling at the start of an event.

3. Begin with an activity that gets people thinking and talking about the content of the programme. Our  ‘Challenging Assumptions’ puzzle is a quick and simple way of introducing people to themes around problem-solving, innovation and  change management. In just a few minutes they experience an activity that they want to talk about and, as they do so, the introductions happen naturally in a relevant learning context.

4. On a ‘technical’ training programme, use a group activity that gets a group working together and also identifies what they already know of the material they will be learning about. RSVP design’s ‘Learning Loops’ is a great example – a quick, multiple-choice question game that can be tailored to use your own content and then provides an excellent way of testing pre-training and post-training knowledge, whilst also building your learning group as they problem-solve together.

For more ideas and more information about any of the activities suggested above, have a look at the website or drop us a line!

energisers, Experiential Learning, icebreakers, introductory team activities, learning challenges, Learning Games, learning tools, Training Games