It’s often useful to make an agile Ice breaker to put everyone in good conditions for a meetup. So we will see one that is very well known in the agile world: the walk and stop.
Preparation
The agile coach will make this first meetup workshop in ideal conditions: enough space for the participants to can to move and to have a good mood.
If you read the name of this ice breaker, you will understand that it will be necessary not to have a room cluttered with tables if you want it to work well.
Time to plan: 15 minutes
Progress of the ice breaker
The agile coach will ask all the participants to get up. He will explain that the exercise will take place in 3 successive steps that we will describe below.
1/ walk and stop
The agile coach will give two different instructions to the participants. When he says “walk”, the participants will have to walk and when he says “stop”, they will have to stop.
After 2 minutes, the coach will ask participants to do the opposite of what he asks; the participants will have to walk when the coach will say “stop” and will have to stop when he says “walk”.
The participants arrive very quickly to do it.
2/ Name and clap
While keeping the last reversed rule of the words “walk” and “stop”, the coach will also ask participants to say their name when he says “name” and will have to tap their hands when he says “clap”.
To further complicate the exercise, the coach asks the participants to also reverse the name and clap; therefore the participants will have to give their hands when the coach will say “name” and will have to say their name when he says “clap”.
In general the first laughs appear because many confusions are created by this exercice.
3/ Jump and Dance
We do the exercise again by adding the “jump” which will order the participants to jump and the “dance” which will force them to dance; the participants will do that in addition to the previous 4 rules implemented in the two previous steps. We will also quickly reverse these new rules
During this last round, the agile coach will not hesitate to make humor to make the participants laugh.
Debriefing of the workshop
The agile coach takes the opportunity to do a debriefing on the workshop, trying to show that we are quickly accustomed to change. The adaptation is not so hard: the first time it’s not easy but we can change and the last time, we change and the change seems simpler.
Conclusion walk and stop
Do not hesitate to do an ice breaker in your meetup or workshop when you feel that the team is a little skeptical of change so that everyone understands that we adapt quickly to change.
There are other cool ice breakers that I will present later with pleasure.
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