Icebreakers
Training Exercises and Resources

This is a fun exercise focusing on word play where the delegates need to converge on a common word based on previously suggested words. When convergence happens, it is immensely enjoyable. The pair feel as if they read each other’s minds. As such, this is a great exercise to bring people closer together. You can also use this exercise as an icebreaker though make sure you don’t run it for longer than 15 minutes.

Consider using this exercise for team building, enhancing vocabulary, creativity and memory. It is also a fantastic exercise for practicing a foreign language as delegates must constantly think of new words in a systematic way and since they get to work in teams, they can learn from each other too. You can also run this easily explained exercise for a large group as teams work in parallel without much impact on timing.

The purpose of icebreakers is to bring people together, familiarise them with each other, put them into the zone and basically break the ice as the name suggests. The purpose of team building activities is to bring the teams together, get them to go through a shared experience, solve problems, make decisions, manage limited resources and usually work against time. To address both, you can take advantage of great educational and entertaining tools in the form of board games.

You can use board games for many training purposes. Some games last long which help to bring a team together and some can be quite short which could be ideal to break the ice. There are cooperative games, competitive games, or even games that don’t have a winner, but just one big loser! Some games abstract down the real world in such imaginative ways that become incredibly rewarding to experience. As such board games are great if you want to create a memorable event which is also educational as this is what many traditional team building games aim to achieve.

In this comprehensive article, you will be introduced to several hand-picked board games that you can use in a training environment to address a variety of topics.

This light-hearted exercise is guaranteed to break the ice quickly and bring people together. In this exercise you set people a mission to find out about other delegates and to share what they have found with the group. It is designed to be entertaining and educational. As such it is ideal for a new team or at the beginning of a new course, workshop or seminar when you want to get people to become familiar with each other quickly.

We sent a questionnaire to the training community on the use of icebreakers and energiser. We asked questions such as, “Are they useful?”, “How do they help?”, “How long should they be?”, and so on. We have now got the results back and would like to share them with you.

There was a total of 103 respondents from around the world. As always, the results are fascinating and educational. They are then followed by what the training community thinks of them in their own words and how these tools are best used.

The results are presented first using graphs and our analysis is then followed.

Just to be clear to all readers, here is a brief intro to each training tool:

This exercise helps delegates to understand and appreciate the power of eye contact and how it can affect emotional connection and emotional states. It is ideal in teaching emotional intelligence, body language and communication skills.

You can get the most from this exercise with the follow up discussions so make sure you allocate enough time for this.

This is a structured icebreaker that encourages delegates to share something about themselves and in the process get to know each other better. It is a simple and yet very effective method in making a group of people quickly feel more comfortable with each other.

Generally, mobile phones are not welcome during a training course. They can distract or annoy people if not switched off. However, like any technology there can also be an advantage for having them around. A series of exercises are presented here that involve using mobile phones to conduct icebreakers, get people to know each other better and facilitate team building exercises.

For all the following exercises, it is assumed that delegates have access to their personal mobile phones, access to internet from the mobile and that they can send text and images to each other. To reduce potential data costs, get them use a Wi-Fi network if possible. For each exercise, instructions are provided on when contacts need to be exchanged or what kind of information needs to be shared. Give your own number to all delegates as several of the exercises require delegates to send you images. You may also need to have access to a system where you can receive these images and show them on a projector so everyone can see an enlarged view of them. This makes many of the exercises easier to conduct rather than relying on seeing images on individual small screens. An alternative approach is to print images directly from you mobile but this can be costly.

Having gone through this collection, if you know of other useful exercises involving mobile phones, please share them below in the comments section.

This is a simpler version of the classic desert island survival exercise. In the classic exercise, a team needs to decide what to take to an island from a shipwreck to maximise their survival. In the version described here, the focus is not on survival; but to see what people would like to take with them and use this as an excuse to talk about themselves. Hence this is more an icebreaker version of the classic team building exercise.

Note that the exercise is not a realistic scenario. It is designed to simply get people to talk about themselves and what they like and in the process get to know each other better.

Suppose you have a group of people that don’t know each other very well and you want to get them feel more comfortable with one another. If you put this group of people in a room together, they will eventually mingle but the process is often inefficient. Most often the talkative or extrovert types dominate the conversations while others simply listen. People receive a lot of information about a few loud people and start to feel frustrated that they couldn’t get a word in. Alternatively, some may simply feel shy and not so comfortable to suddenly talk about themselves among a group of strangers.

In such cases, a structured approach to break the ice is useful. One simple way to do this is to divide the delegates into smaller groups and provide them with a set of questions that encourages them to talk about specific topics. This exercise and its variations help you achieve this.

Note that the questions listed here are designed to excite and encourage the delegates to talk. They go beyond the usual questions often suggested such as, “What is your hobby?”, or “What country do you like to travel to?” The aim is to ask deeper and more meaningful questions that touch the heart and make the person really excited to talk about themselves. In fact, these questions can make the person learn something about themselves which makes the exercise much more useful.

Often it will take much more than a few minutes to answer some of the questions listed here, but this is fine for the purpose of this exercise because the aim is to simply make people talk excitedly about themselves.

The collection of questions presented here can also be used to interview people or when you simply want to get a person talk about themselves. They can be rather effective in making an emotional connection.

In this exercise delegates get to form a line based on the order of their birthdays without talking. It provides an opportunity for nonverbal communication, self-organisation, nominating a leader if necessary and quick decision making.