The Truth About Icebreakers 01 – the golden age

The truth about Icebreakers (and energisers)

We all use them, we all have our favourites – but have you ever stopped and really thought about what they are for and why we do them?

In this short series Paul explores our reasons for needing icebreakers (& energizers) and the true impact they have before challenging us to be more outcome focused. The series finishes with this statement:

So lets throw away the old tired icebreakers and lets get serious about thinking more deeply about how we might use them to deliver some real benefits for our learners

The Golden Age for Icebreakers

Many years ago most trainers did pretty much the same thing. There were two basic versions:

• Creeping death – “We are going to go round the table and I’d like you to introduce yourself to the rest of the group, include number of years in the organisation, your role, and one really interesting fact about yourself.” This got a slight refinement when we introduced the idea of people introducing the person next to them; adding an addition level of stress to the exercise.
• Launch the koosh-ball. Similar to “creeping death” but you get to nominate who the next person is by launching a koosh-ball (or in my case Sammy the Starfish) at them.This tended to get out of hand as we went around the group and levels of velocity and aggression seemed to climb. (Some even found it amusing to launch the ball at the only person not looking at the time)

What was the purpose of this?

What learning outcomes did we want from it?

Did it achieve these outcomes?

In most cases it was supposed to help people to settle down and for the trainer to get a feel for the group.

Later on Icebreakers began to appear at different times of the day (and got renamed energisers. Yugh!):

• the post break icebreaker,
• the after-lunch icebreaker
• little 5 -10 minute energizer designed to “get us back into it”

Unfortunately, these types of Icebreakers have become so over-used and formulaic that anyone who has done any training at all in the last 10 years is all too aware of the discomfort they can cause.

In fact they have been so overused that they linger long in the mind long after the course content has been forgotten.

I was recently discussing this with someone who hasn’t been on a training course for a while and was asking her what her concerns might be about signing up for a session. She said:

I would love to do some more development but the thought of sitting there in the 1^st half hour and being asked to turn to the person next to me, find out as much as I can about them and introduce them to the rest of the group is too embarrassing and I don’t want to do that again

When asked to recall the subject of the last course she went on when this happened she could not remember.

Another recent participant on our “Master Coaching” programme said:

What was so refreshing was that you avoided the clichés

When asked for an example he said:

I am sick to death of trying to find ‘one interesting thing about me’ in the introductions. There were never that many interesting things about me anyway and after attending more than 6 courses over several years my supply ran dry. AND, the things that other people said were interesting about them very often weren’t. In most cases it really was a case of “You had to be there”

We now understand so much more about learning; the way the brain works, how we learn; and we are beginning to understand the importance of managing the state of our learners; it has become clear that each time we ran a random little icebreaker we missed a glorious opportunity to enhance the learning experience.

Firstly it’s important to reframe icebreakers into what they actually are (and understand what they are not).

• They are not very useful to get everyone introduced to everyone else. That happens as the day progresses and there are much better ways of doing it.
• They are not very helpful as a device to settle everyone down as they create more stress than they fix in many people.
• They are not very helpful as a way of helping the trainer “get a feel for the group” as it reveals very little about individuals learning preferences, it doesn’t help us to understand peoples’ readiness to learn, nor does it reveal much about their willingness to learn.

In the next article, we’ll explore how can we reframe “icebreakers” so that they enhance the learning experience of our learners and add some powerful insights for the trainer.

Icebreaker image by Juska Wendland
Bored image by Kaptain Kobold

Paul and Ally are working on an exciting 6-part (online) course to help your learners fully engage with your training - sign up for the 'early bird' list for advanced notification and more info

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