5 Tips For Crafting Engaging and Inclusive Icebreaker Experiences
Similar icebreakers can be lubricating or draining depending on the situation and implementation. As someone who finds a new buddy or two almost every week, I was initially surprised that I only made one friend through Skip the Small Talk (speed dating for friends) after attending four events in different cities and online. As a social experimenter, I couldn’t help analyzing why almost everyone I met wanted to talk about my career or Zoom background rather than the prompts. Come to think of it, the one friend I did make was someone I’d already started vibing with in a free form group conversation before the event formally started. As I tuned into others’ comfort levels in different icebreaker experiences, I grew more aware of which I found energizing or draining myself. This shifted my mindset from pressuring myself to be smooth in all situations (and burning out trying) to exploring how to find and create spaces that better accommodate our natural human needs and patterns. I noticed a few trends in experiences that fostered more depth with less effort from participants (based on my and others’ reviews.)
1. Moderated Groups Are Better for Intimate Questions
Groups give people time to reflect on the questions and others’ responses to create a more thoughtful discussion. Moderation takes the pressure off participants to come up with responses to every share. The moderator can step in to make sure everyone feels heard, especially when the group is tongue-tied. Lack of context about the sharer and a level of intimacy with strangers that’s rare for most people can make coming up with responses hard.
I’m not surprised that polls at every Skip the Small Talk event I attended showed that most participants wished their partner had shared more. Few people have developed the skill to make others feel comfortable opening up to a stranger and we can’t expect them to learn without teaching through example. While trial and error is necessary to crystalize learning, it’s an unnecessarily painful and time consuming way to start. The norm of jumping to paying to play without an option to pay to be taught is a pet peeve of mine across American culture, but I digress. More importantly, friendship should be accessible to anyone with the skills to be a friend, not gate kept behind unrelated skills.
2. Don’t Rush Conversational Pacing
We usually don’t jump back and forth rapidly between sharing vulnerable stories and holding space for them from others. It can take time to decompress from sharing before we can be fully present with someone else’s story. I feel bad about the times I’ve ended up in automatic mode and couldn’t truly empathize or even remember most of people’s stories at rapidfire icebreaker events because of the pressure and drain of switching back and forth.
The time needed to share and respond without feeling rushed varies by person and context and I’d recommend seeking feedback on pacing along with the format and overall experience. While a couple minutes per share might be enough for funny anecdotes, I notice that more vulnerable shares often take much longer to reach closure depending on the level of vulnerability, diversity, and marginalization within the group. Skip the Small Talk’s five minutes felt sufficient to me for their slightly vulnerable and generally open ended questions (though I can’t speak for everyone.) We often ended up with extra time for miscellaneous chit-chat, which I’d take over being interrupted in the middle of a vulnerable story any day, especially if I’m about to jump right into an interaction with another stranger. In emotional support groups, I’ve seen shares vary greatly in length and often go over fifteen or even thirty minutes. This especially applies in groups where members have extremely limited outlets for similar conversations, like Black Neurodiversity’s Neurodistinct Check-Ins on Clubhouse, where members constantly mention feeling dismissed or misunderstood in other spaces due to their intersectionality.
3. Match People Based on Interests (or Cater to One Interest Per Event)
Another way to decrease the context switching and the empathy divide is to match people based on shared interests (or sub-interests within a topical event.) This can be as simple as letting people select from a list of topics and/or levels of depth. People with similar context or comfort levels with expression have an easier time responding to each other. Conversations between them often naturally flow into hangouts, brainstorming, or collaborations.
While learning to empathize with diverse lived experiences is essential to responsibly making decisions that impact broader populations, on-the-spot, public icebreakers are rarely the best format for addressing potentially contentious topics. Crossing gaps in context requires a level of space that’s easier to obtain with a heads-up, in piecemeal, or through one-way storytelling with time for the audience to digest. Icebreakers tend to help people bond over similarities more than differences, though some skilled moderators can surface the common human threads in niche journeys.
4. Use Open Ended Questions
Even when people want to open up, they usually don’t want to open up about everything to everyone. Asking people to describe something specific risks forcing them to choose between telling a white lie, telling a story they don’t want to, or opting out, all of which could kill the vibe. Some examples I’ve heard (eg. biggest challenge or most embarrassing moment) remind me of job interview questions. (I think “tell me about A time” surfaces better stories than “tell me about THE time” in a work context too.)
Even favorites (eg. books, movies, or songs) can expose people in unwanted ways. Worse, they can surface some people’s insecurities and others’ bragging points. For example, while the favorite book question might feel fitting for an AI discussion, it was a tense decision for me to decide whether to give my honest answer: No Bad Parts, the book that helped me overcome depression. While I’m relatively open about mental health, I didn’t feel comfortable going there as one of a couple women and non-technical professionals in a circle full of male AI engineers, so I dodged the question. If they’d asked about A book rather than THE book, I would’ve had a much more fitting answer for the space. When several people shared their favorite movies instead, I knew I wasn’t alone in my discomfort.
5. Create Space for Participants to Share What’s On Their Minds
Most icebreaker questions interest some more than others. I’ve often stuck around in mutual boredom because of the increased friction to change the subject compared to a regular conversation. Some of my most grounded icebreaker experiences started with questions about what was on our minds about a topic. This worked in contexts focused on both thoughts and feelings eg. a burning question we have about AI or a challenge we’re facing in our career. In our busy world, people are much more likely to follow up when they receive insight or acknowledgement about what’s currently important to them.
