Balloons as an Ice Breaker

[Lisa Heft]

Hi, Lucas - if you trust the process, and you trust the people, no  
need to add any additional icebreakers - it is using precious minutes  
of their time.  Many of us have worked with government folks. My  
recommendation is use every moment / don't waste any time / get to the  
Open Space.  Don't do something directive, or creative, or 'helpy', or  
helping them feel something, or weaving them together or anything.   
Jump into Open Space. Trust it. Trust them.
This ain't like other designed facilitated meetings. Open Space  
delivers. Delivers creativity, discovery, interchange, emergent  
thinking.
As long as you are not morphing it or squishing it into too short a  
time or rushing them or doing OS when it's really a situation best  
done with a different (dialogue) tool.

My two Euros, anyway (I'm WOSonOS-ing in Berlin at the moment)

Lisa
PS: Brightly colored principles and laws signs jazz the place up.  
People jazz the place up. Animated conversations jazz the place up....

>
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Lucas Cioffi  
> <lucas at athenabridge.org> wrote:
> 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.
> 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 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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