Icebreakers have withstood the test of time. Whether you revere them, despise them, or merely endure them, they remain a fundamental part of getting strangers to talk to one another.
A badly conceived icebreaker casts a pall over an event. The forced camaraderie is hard to shake off. A good one does the opposite: it turns a room of strangers into a group of people who’ve actually spoken, which is the precondition for every useful conversation that follows.
Here are three we like, gathered from planners and attendees, and none of them involve trust falls.
Define yourself in five
Most people want to get to the point at a networking event. Give someone five words to describe what they do, and they will.
The goal: concise introductions, with enough of a game attached that nobody dreads their turn.
You’ll want: a buzzer or a cowbell. Optional, but it makes it.
How it runs: gather everyone in a semi-circle or around tables where they can see each other. Explain that each person gets to describe who they are, or what they do, in five words or fewer, and that being creative counts for more than being accurate. Introduce the cowbell: go over five words and you get rung. Demonstrate it yourself, then go around the room. Applaud each one. At the end, call out the best.
Tips: encourage people to be strange rather than professional. Keep it fast. The cowbell is doing more work than you think. The absurdity is what lowers the stakes.
Speed networking
Borrowed, frankly, from the one-on-one appointment format used at industry marketplaces, a mishmash of speed dating and structured networking that works far better than it has any right to.
The goal: meet as many people as possible in a short window.
You’ll want: a timer and something loud.
How it runs: arrange chairs in two concentric circles facing each other, or use tables and seat people opposite one another. Set a fixed time per interaction: two minutes is right. Start the timer. When it ends, ring the bell and have the outer circle shift one seat to the right. Repeat until people have met a meaningful number of others, or until they return to where they started.
Tips: tell people in advance so they can prepare a short introduction. Give them a couple of conversation-starter questions to fall back on. Two minutes is long enough to be memorable and short enough that a bad match costs nothing.
The spider web
The goal: make the group’s connections literally visible.
You’ll want: a ball of yarn.
How it runs: form a circle, an arm’s length apart. Hold the end of the yarn, share something about yourself, then throw the ball across the circle, keeping hold of your strand. The next person does the same. As it continues, a web forms across the room. Keep going until everyone has spoken and the web is complete, then ask people what they learned about someone else.
Tips: push for the lesser-known fact, not the job title. Throw gently. If the group is large, run two balls of yarn at once so nobody is standing around.
Happy icebreaking.