Balloons as an Ice Breaker

[Lucas Cioffi]

Howdy All,

Bottom line up front: How do you break the ice with participants unfamiliar
to OS?

Here's one way I found helpful:
 I recently facilitated an open space workshop for sixty participants from
roughly two dozen federal agencies.  The topic was how to make government
more transparent, participatory, and collaborative as part of the
Administration's Open Government
Directive<http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/open-government-directive>
.
I'm a novice at OS, but I've learned a bunch from this list and I'm happy to
offer an idea which may be helpful to others.  OS can be intimidating,
especially for government employees, so I opened with a collaborative
exercise using balloons.  The inspiration came from a landscape architect's
presentation where he accented a landscape with huge balloon sculptures to
give it a playful feel for adults.

*Rules of the Game:*

   - Everyone gets 2 colored balloons in a sealed envelope.
   - There is a point system posted on the wall (Red = 5, Orange = 4, Yellow
   = 3, Green = 2, Blue = 1).
   - Collaboration through trading is heavily incentivized-- if someone ends
   up with a pair of balloons which are the same color, then their score is
   multiplied times three.  This encourages people to mingle and create win-win
   scenarios.  There are no restrictions on how balloons can be traded (for
   example trading 1 for 1, 2 for 1, or even 0 for 1).
   - Participants are given three minutes to inflate and trade their
   balloons.  The goal is to have the most points.  (An alternate goal could be
   to maximize the number of points for the entire group rather than
   individuals.)

*Reasons why we opened with a game:*

   - Make it clear that this was a place where it's OK to be creative,
   unlike their standard government workplace
   - Prime the audience for the subject matter of collaboration (learn by
   doing)
   - Have some fun
   - Build a bit of community among the participants who were mostly
   strangers (incentivize mingling).
   - Create a shared experience.
   - Create a little chaos.
   - Jazz up the place visually with a few balloons (it needed some color)

*Reasons why we opened with this game for this workshop*
Thomas Jefferson had a saying that “He who receives ideas from me, receives
instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at
mine receives light without darkening me.”  After the exercise I asked the
participants what the difference was between trading a physical object (like
a balloon) and sharing an idea; this exercise was lively and helped them
understand that their purpose during the workshop was to share knowledge and
benefit from others doing the same.

Each month a different agency hosts this workshop for all the other
agencies, and to keep the workshops fresh, our next opener will consist of
small collaborative teams competing to build the tallest
marshmallow-spaghetti tower (here's a fascinating TED
video<http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower.html> which
describes some stats behind this game).

Any thoughts?  Do you open with games or collaborative exercises that you
would recommend?  As always, thanks for the discussion!
Lucas

*
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