Large
Group Ice Breaker Games and Energizers
Do
you need some games to get people moving and raise the energy level in the
room? Or an activity that helps to break the ice and
get participants comfortable with talking to each other. Consider these
exercises!
This
is a fun and loud energizer game based on the well-known “Rock, Paper, Scissor”
game. People play against each other in pairs until the first win. But instead
of the losing players becoming eliminated from the tournament, they become a
fan of the winner, and they cheer for them as the winner plays against a new
opponent. You repeat the process until there are only two players left with a
huge fan base cheering for them. The last two players have to play until one
has won twice. As this activity tends to get loud, it’s best to play it
somewhere outside.
Doodling
Together is a fun and creative icebreaker where the group gets to
collaboratively draw postcards through a series of instructions as participants
complete the postcards started by others. You can simply use this technique in
parallel groups as the instructions are easy to follow. It is a great exercise
to establish creative confidence, collaborate effortlessly and build capacity
for working together as a workshop-group.
Bang
is a group game, played in a circle, where participants must react quickly or
face elimination. One person stands in the middle of the circle as “the
sheriff”, pointing at other players who must quickly crouch while those on
either side of them quickly “draw”. A good activity to generate laughter in a
group. It can also help with name-learning for groups getting to know each
other. For events with more than 30 people, it is best to play it in parallel
groups.
In
this exercise, every participant creates three thoughtful questions that they
want to ask from other group members to get to know them better. People start
to mingle to ask and answer questions in pairs. After asking a question and
listening to the answer, they hand over that question. Thus, in each one-on-one
meeting, participants will swap one question each. This allows people to learn
interesting facts about each other and works with a group size up to 50-60
people.
Team
Building Games for Large Groups
Facilitation
techniques and activities to build effective teams and support teamwork. Foster
trust and openness for better collaboration and manage team dynamics
effectively.
The
activities will help you to initiate meaningful conversation in the group,
provide a starting a point for focusing on teamwork and collaboration, and
importantly give engaging tasks to participants in which they work together.
This is essential to increase cohesion within teams. The key for successfully
achieving these goals in large groups is to have exercises that can be easily
in smaller groups in parallel:
This
game helps group members to get to know each other better through a creative
drawing exercise: Each participant draws their own coat of arms – a design that
is unique to themselves, representing important characteristics, achievements
and values of its owner.
If
you want to direct the focus of this exercise to certain areas, then you can
instruct people to which question to answer in each segment of the Coat of
Arms. (E.g. What is something you are very good at? What is something
your colleagues don’t know about you?).
When
people are finished drawing, they present their work to in their group. The
presentation part is practical to do in smaller groups. And whether you have a
small or large group, you can arrange a neat Coat of Arms gallery by sticking
all the drawings on the wall of the workshop room.
In
eighteen minutes, teams of 3-5 people must build the tallest free-standing
structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string,
and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. Since the instructions
are fairly simple, it is easy to scale this activity up to 20-30 groups playing
in parallel and competing who builds the highest structure. It emphasizes
collaboration, group communication, leadership dynamics and problem-solving
strategy.
The
Helium stick activity gives a simple challenge to teams that require teamwork
and coordination to manage. People are lined up in two rows facing each other,
5 to 10 people per row, depending on the length of the sticks you have for the
game. Participants point with their index finger and hold their arms out in a
way that a stick can be horizontally laid on their index fingers.
The
task is to lower the stick to the ground while everyone’s index fingers stay in
contact with the rod. Why Helium Stick? Often times, the stick will rise first 🙂
You
can easily scale this activity for larger groups, just have as many sticks as
the number of lines you will create, and the sub-groups will compete against
each other who manages to lower their stick first.
Large
Group Facilitation Techniques
There
are dedicated facilitation methods that work really effectively if you need
certain conversations to happen in large groups. The techniques below can be
used as core activities for planning and facilitating large group workshops.
They tend to have only a few guiding principles and rules, which allows smaller
groups to organise and manage themselves during a workshop.
Open
Space Technology – developed by Harrison Owen – is a method perfectly suited
for organizing and running large scale meetings, often multi-day events, where
participants self-organize themselves to find solutions for a complex issue.
There are only a few rules guiding the structure of the event, and the agenda
is created by the people attending. It is a great method for tacking important
and complex problems where the solutions are not obvious. The technology can
accommodate hundreds of people.
World
Café, developed by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, is a simple yet powerful method
to host large group dialogue. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and
provide simple guidelines for the groups of people to discuss different topics
at different tables. Participants switch tables periodically and getting
introduced to the previous discussion at their new table by a “table host”. The
structure of this method enables meaningful conversations driven completely by
participants and the topics that they find relevant and important.
While
the World Café is a structured process to encourage the cross-pollination of
ideas in a large group, the Conversation Café is structured to begin a dialogue
regarding a provocative or complex question. So, here the group members do not
switch tables, but participate in four rounds of conversation with taking
different approaches to exchange opinions and discuss the same topic in depth.
The format helps to build trust and connection between group members and
therefore well-suited to handle controversial or difficult topics among diverse
participants. Again this method is very practical when dealing with large
groups by setting up parallel discussion groups.
Idea
Generation Methods for Large Groups
The
classic – and often ineffective – shout-out type of brainstorming session has a
natural limitation when it comes to large groups. However, there are other
methods that provide a structured way to get people into creative thinking and
elicit innovative ideas from everyone in the room even if you have dozens of
participants.
This
is an idea generation method that is really easy to scale into large groups,
yet still allows every participant to actively take part in the process. You
split the audience into groups of four, share the challenge or question that
people should focus on, then kick off the following sequence of activities in
the parallel groups: at first, silent self-reflection by individuals, then
generate ideas in pairs, and then share and develop further the ideas in the
circle of four people. At the end of the process, the best ideas from each
group should be shared with the whole audience. This method allows to leverage
the whole group’s intelligence and everyone will be included.
Decision-making
Techniques for Large Groups
The
following workshop activities will help you to prioritize the most promising
ideas with a large group and select up with the best actions and goals to
execute.
Dot
voting – or ‘dotmocracy’ – is a method for prioritising options and making
decisions by a group. Every participant receives a set of colourful sticky dots
and they place them next to the ideas they find best – the ideas need to be
written on post-its or on a board before the voting starts. There are different
variations: you may give multiple dots to people and they can choose how many
dots they assign to each option they like. This tools quickly helps to
recognise without spending time on discussions, which options are the most
popular.
One
thing to watch out for is the group bias, though: The more voting dot an option
collects during the process, the more appealing it may become to get further
votes from the participants who still have to assign their dots. For this
reason, it is wise to use dot-voting not as a final instrument to select the
best option, but as an indicator of which few options are the most popular.
Closing
activities for large groups
These
facilitation techniques help to effectively close a large group session. They
are simple, time-bound and allow every group member to share their opinion and
find the key takeaways after a workshop or event.
‘Feedback’
has a quite controversial perception. Have you ever met this situation? Someone
is asked to present back after a group session and it gets unfocused. It goes
on long it’s off the point and people start losing concentration It’s sometimes
known as ‘death by feedback’.
This
method helps to maintain attention and forces everyone to stay concise during a
closing round with a natural limit: You are only allowed to share your opinion
with just one breath – that is usually no longer for 30 seconds for most
people. In case you have a large group, it works most effectively if you split
up the group to circles of 10-15 participants, in order to keep the feedback
round under five minutes.
Feedback
Mingle is a great closing activity to generate positive energy in the group. At
the end of the session, group members are invited to give feedback to every
other member of the group via post-it notes. You can use prompt questions to
direct the feedback, such as “What I appreciate the most about you…” and
“My challenge to you going forward is…”.
After
people finished writing a post-it note to everyone else in the group, invite
them to mingle and deliver the feedback to each other. The feedback should always
happen one-on-one, shared verbally. If you have larger groups, create smaller
groups of people who worked together during the event.
You
can use this activity at the end of a workshop or training program to inspire
future action. Participants write and send a letter to their future self, in
relation to how they will apply the insights and learning they got during the
course. For instance, you may ask them to focus on a simple question: “What
will I achieve by a certain date?”
When
explaining the task, tell the group that you will post the cards/letters in X
number of months, and that they should take that into account when writing. You
can define the timeframe with the group. Since participants reflect
individually in this activity, there is no limitation to scale this exercise in
larger groups.
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