Ice Breaker #7: Non-musical chairs

Non-musical chairs
Non-musical chairs

I’m going to present you an ice breaker quite common in the world of agility because it allows to understand the interest of the iterations in a process of continuous improvement: I present you “The non-musical chairs”. Good news, this Ice Breaker is also fun.

The facilitators always make these Ice Breakers at the beginning of the session (workshop or meetup); they create an atmosphere that is often much more relaxed following them.

Also discover our: Ice Breaker / Energizer

Non-musical chairs

The concept of non-musical chairs is quite simple. Place chairs in a circle-shaped in one room with a wide enough gap between them. However, it will be necessary to leave one more chair than the number of participants in the game so that there is always a free chair.

When the facilitator gives the go, he will try to sit on the free chair. He will time his time to succeed in doing so.

To prevent this, participants will have to move from chair to chair by sitting on it. Be careful, if a participant gets up from his chair, he will not be able to sit back on it; he has to sit on another chair before.

Participants will not be able to use any traps to prevent the facilitator to sit on a chair; they will only be able to move from chair to chair.

 

Les chaises non musicales
Non-musical chairs

When the facilitator has succeed to sit on the free chair, he will suggest the team to take 1 minute to see together how to do better to prevent the facilitator to sit down.

The interest is to show the team that we can improve each iteration when we take a little time to look for axis of improvement.

The team will aim to improve at each iteration of the game by preventing the facilitator to sit down longer. In general, we propose 4 iterations with this moment of improvement of 1 minute.

 

Conclusion

Now, you know an Ice breaker also Energizer which also allows to understand the interest of doing retrospectives at the end of iteration to improve.

Some people use it in training to bring the notion of continuous improvement very important in the agile mindset.

 

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About Judicaël Paquet 368 Articles
Judicaël Paquet (agile coach and senior devops) My Engagements in France and Switzerland: - Crafting Agile Transformation Strategies - Tailored Agile Training Programs - Raising Awareness and Coaching for Managers - Assessing Agile Maturity and Situational Analysis - Agile Coaching for Teams, Organizations, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Agile Coaches Areas of Expertise: Scrum, Kanban, Management 3.0, Scalability, Lean Startup, Agile Methodology.

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