Icebreakers for meetings that don’t stink

Nov 28

It seems that the last post I wrote on icebreakers on this website was TEN years ago, and it was about 5 icebreaker games for your next event. And by event I mean party. The post talks about prompts you can give a party host to help make things less awkward for people who don’t know each other - and most of these work best if the party is in your own house.

But what do you do if you’re in a work meeting and need a question? I’ve got you. And 10 more years of experience. Here are 10 ideas for when you next find yourself in this situation.

Have a large group tell a story together, one sentence at a time

I did this once with a 30 person team. The story really took some twists and turns and you can definitely tell who’s paying attention and who’s not - but overall, I thought it was a lot of fun. If you can set a theme, I think you’re better off. My theme was writing a story about Mario 64 characters (long story). If you’re in real life together, it’s easy to just get in a circle and use that as your path for whose turn is next. If you’re virtual, you just need to write everyone’s name in a document, share screen and go down the list. Make sure folks know if you will be going around the circle once or more than once though, so that they know when the story will be coming to an end.

Have a PowerPoint presentation party

I’ve written a whole post on this already, but I always have a really, really good time at a PowerPoint party. People have so many things they want to say to someone, but no one to listen. (Their newest hobby, their newest obsession, what they’re reading right now, what they’re listening to…) You could do this in a large group and just have a few presenters, or you could break people into smaller groups and just have them present to each other. I recommend giving each person 5 minutes (and then either cut them off ceremoniously or just hope they finish in 10). It may unlock new connections that you hadn’t thought of — and also, it helps with presentation skills!

Answer questions based on your candy selection

Pass around a bucket of candy (or of anything really) and make people answer a specific question based on what they selected out of the bucket. My boss did this when I was a resident assistant (RA) in college and each piece of candy had a specific theme associated with it. From a quick Chat GPT prompt, might I suggest:

M&Ms: What are some ‘M&Ms’—Memorable Moments—that shaped who you are?
Kit Kat: If you could take a ‘break’ from anything for a day, what would it be?
Twix: What’s a skill you have that’s a real ‘twix’ of the trade?
Snickers: What’s something that always makes you ‘snicker’—a guaranteed laugh?
Milky Way: If you could travel anywhere in the ‘Milky Way,’ where would you go and why?
Almond Joy: What brings you the most ‘joy’ these days?
Three Musketeers: Who are the three people in your life you’d call your ‘Three Musketeers’?
Reese’s: What’s a ‘piece’ of your life you’d love to share with the group?

The key is to not tell people that they’re going to need to answer questions before they choose the candy.

And obviously, you can Chat GPT this for any category of things. Different questions for different color starbursts, different bags of chips, different flavors of hot chocolate, etc. People get to answer questions and get a treat. The prompt I used was, “design an icebreaker game based on choosing mini candy bars out of a bowl. You need to answer a question about yourself based on the candy bar you choose. The question you answer should be a pun based on the name of the candy.”

They did try to play a variation of this game for my high school freshmen orientation where they told you that you were going to go on a camping trip for a weekend and were supposed to take as many squares of toilet paper as you thought you’d need. We had no idea why we were doing this, and then after we took our number of squares they told us that we needed to share one fun fact about ourselves for each square we took. Maybe this one is more your speed?

Share your perspective using identity circles

In college, I had a professor who did an activity where everyone needed to stand in a circle. Then he would shout out sentences and you needed to step towards the center of the circle based on how much you agreed with it. For example, if he said “I like chocolate“ and you LOVE chocolate, you’d run to the center of the circle and if you only liked chocolate a little you would take a few steps in. (If you were allergic, you might even step backwards.) You reset after each prompt.

He used sentences that were much deeper than this though. He would use sentences that covered racism, classism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, and religion. This professor is actually still doing this work today through the Culture of Respect course he leads.

You can make this as deep or as not deep as you want. A middle ground might be to use “personality quiz” type questions for example, tradition is important to me, I get energy from being with people, I prefer to make decisions spontaneously, manners are extremely important to me, I find it easy to adapt to new situations, etc.

I did this activity at my 30th birthday party to help introduce people to each other. If two people had something in common during the icebreaker, they would know that they could talk to that other person about that thing at some point during the party. People seemed to enjoy it!

Networking BINGO

I will never tire of Networking BINGO. I just think it’s an excellent game. It gets people up and moving, you can customize it for any group, and it helps people learn about each other. You can make the BINGO board yourself or use an online tool (because apparently Canva has its own BINGO card generator now, because of course it does).

If you’ve never played, you essentially fill each box of the BINGO card (except the center, that remains a free space) with a different identity-based sentence. For example, I’m a night owl, or I’m from Connecticut, or I’ve jumped out of a plane. You give a BINGO card to each person and tell them to go find somebody who meets each criterion. When you find someone who meets one, you check off the box. It is important to tell people if the point is to fill out the whole card or get 5 in a row or 4 corners. If the point is to get people talking and/or if you haven’t mixed up which prompts are in which boxes, I’d recommend to just play the whole card. Then whoever finishes first wins.

You can also use Chat GPT for this exercise to try to customize the spaces. I gave it the prompt of, “Write 24 BINGO space prompts to use for networking BINGO in a group of co-workers who are ages 22-45 and live all over the country. Most people do not have children.“ Example prompts it came up with include: has worked at the company for more than 10 years, loves a spicy food challenge, has a go-to karaoke song, has strong opinions about airport snacks, and has completed a DIY home project. Or if you don’t want to use Chat GPT, you can just reference this list of 101 PG-13 never have I ever questions that I used when I was an RA.

Find something you have in common

This might sound obvious, but if make it a competition between small groups of people and you can really generate some buzz. Send people into small groups and tell them they have to come up with something they all have in common. When the small groups come back together they will share their item and whoever comes up with the most obscure piece of information wins. This will help people take it from “we all have a brother” to “we all eat our M&Ms in rainbow order.“

As somebody who has been in these small groups before, the conversation rabbit holes that you go down while coming up with what you have in common are the best part of the process, so don’t forget to leave time for that. I’d say give at least 10 minutes. 15 if people need to do introductions in addition to finding something they have in common.

Assign a character

As a person who likes personality tests and Cosmo quizzes, I love a “which character are you” quiz. If you think you can get away with it (because it could get contentious), you can choose a “universe“ and decide together which character to assign to each person on the team. For example, the Office, the Muppets, Friends, Game of Thrones, Marvel, or Disney — any universe that has a lot of people.

If you have a smaller number of team members, you can find a universe that has your exact number of team members, for example with 4 people you could do the Seinfeld characters, with 5 the How I Met Your Mother cast, with 6 the Friends cast, with 7 you could do the 7 dwarfs, or with 8 the Star Trek Next Generation main crew. You can use Chat GPT to help you come up with ideas of universes. However, if you have a group of people who may get offended, I recommend choosing an endless universe so that no one gets stuck being “the annoying one.“

If you’ve ever played Jackbox Games, there’s one called Role Models (for up to 6 people) that assigns you roles like this based on questions you answer together as a group. The descriptive text for the game says, “Everybody’s somebody, so who are you? The planner? The flake? The sassy one? Only your friends know the real you, and now they have the perfect excuse to tell you all about it.“ My favorite answer I ever got was “super fancy super moody socialite,” which I felt was incredibly accurate that day.

And if you can’t play this game as an icebreaker, maybe consider playing it at a bar after work with your favorite coworker. It’s a good time.

Take a quiz together

You can build your own quiz, using an app like Kahoot (free for up to 10 people), or you can find an already existing quiz on a site like Sporcle (anybody remember Sporcle?). You can either make people compete against each other or work together to solve the puzzle as fast as you can. I had team once that would choose a different quiz to do every week on the team call, and it only took about 5-10 minutes of the meeting (and brought a lot of joy!). Sporcle divides quizzes into categories so you can choose something that’s relevant to your players for example, sports, music, movies, history, literature, or geography!

Speaking of geography - I’ve also been with teams that liked playing map games! You can play a game like Guess Where You Are (this is an amazing game to play with folks who have been in the military and traveled the world) — or I even once had my team stay on the line long enough to identify the world’s 150 largest countries. This took closer to 45 minutes, but brings up some fun stories (and debates!) along the way!

Get in a line

I have wanted to do this for a really long time, but haven’t executed it yet. In fact, I wanted to do it at my wedding, but just couldn’t fit it into the agenda. I would love to make people lined up in order of different things — by favorite color (and they line up in rainbow order), by height, by age, alphabetized by first name or last name, etc. In general, I love organization, but I also love the amount of conversation that would need to take place for people to get in the right order.

I feel like when we played this game in middle school they used to tell you to do it without talking as well, which was always an adventure in frantic hand gestures. The teachers were probably just looking for some peace and quiet though.

Give them a “secret-Santa” task

Usually we just think of Secret Santa as a holiday activity, but there’s no reason you can’t do this all year. Doing nice things for people is always a nice thing. So you can assign everyone a person ahead of time and have them either write them a note, write a haiku summarizing their personality, get them a gift, or even take them to coffee before the event so you can present them. This helps foster team cammeraderie and also helps hype up the anticipation of an event before it happens because you’ve already spent so much time thinking about it.

Ask a question

Asking a question will never not get old. People say they don’t like icebreaker questions, but honestly, I think they’re just asking the wrong questions. (It’s the same way that I think people who can’t listen to Christmas music all year aren’t listening to the right Christmas music.) I’ve been saving my favorite questions for the last 15 years for when I need one on the spot. My favorites so far have been:

Where do you feel most like yourself?
If someone was visiting your hometown, what would they need ot stop by and see to do?
What is your goal by the end of the decade?
What reality TV show would you want to be on?
What is something you learned recently?
What is one album you would listen to for the rest of your life?
If you could keep only two apps on your phone, which would they be?
What is one sauce or condiment you couldn’t live without?
What cartoon character would you want to hang out with?
What’s your song of the moment?
What do you spend most of your time thinking about these days?
How do you like your eggs?
How were your classes organized in high school?
If you could have a vending machine, what would you vend?
What is your favorite kind of science?
If you could take one skill from everyone at the table, what would it be?
If you could create one new event or festival, what would it be?

Similarly to this, you can ask someone what their relationship to _______ is, where the blank is anything from DNA tests to the Titanic to breakfast cereal. Everyone has a certain story that comes to mind when you hear each one of these things, and it’s interesting to see how different they all are from each other.

A good question can go a long way. I have found that following Priya Parker on Instagram always helps add new questions to my rotation. I also have the book If (Questions for the Game of Life) sitting next to my computer desk so I can pull out a question on a whim, if needed. (Some are definitely not okay for a work setting though.)

I’d recommend starting a list of your favorite questions too so that you can always go back to them in a pinch.

I love an icebreaker game. I hear that I’m the exception to a rule, but I have a theory that if you find the right icebreaker game for your situation that you, too, could love a good icebreaker game.