Workshop ice-breaker collection

Ice-breakers can get a bad reputation for being a waste of limited time. However, effective ice-breakers are an essential tool in every workshop or meeting, in making the group feel comfortable, eliciting more information and demonstrating desired behaviours.

The 5 categories of ice-breakers — It’s important to choose an ice-breaker that fits the needs and purpose of the workshop/meeting you are facilitating. Start with an objective, which will depend on external factors e.g. where you are in the process, time of day, size of the group etc. We categorised some of the most effective ice-breakers by 5 common objectives:

Getting personal

Use these activities to help participants bond, create a feeling of safety and cohesion, and move beyond the 'professional' sphere into the personal. Introduce them at the beginning of a workshop, because they also help participants get familiar with using Miro.

• Who is here?

• Mini-superpower

• Where are you?

Encourage teamwork

With these activities, you can get participants to work together as a group and demonstrate how collaboration leads to better outcomes.

• 1 to 20

• Speed sketch

Demonstrate divergent thinking

You can encourage participants to think more creatively. Often by asking the 'unreasonable', people feel more confident to think outside of the box.

• Invent a game

• This is not...

Convergent thinking

These activities are all about helping people to refine, analyse and synthesise. The objective is to make your participants feel more reflective.

• One word check-in

• Map of me

Injecting energy

Sometimes you need a bit of light fun to break up the intensity of a workshop. With these activities, you will keep participants engaged and focused in the middle of a slump or tackling a particularly complex topic.

• GIF tournament

• Pictionary

After every energiser, ask the group what they thought the point of the exercise was. Relate this to the next task they will be doing. This will get them to reflect on the objective and ground it in logic. It’s also a useful way to demonstrate the type of behaviour/thinking required.

How do they work—

Each ice-breaker activity template is created and shared with clear instructions on how to use it, along with the approximate time it takes to complete each activity.

To add these ice-breakers to your workshop board, simply copy the frame of the ice-breaker and paste it into your Miro board.