Moving Beyond Icebreakers

Here's a new interactive for your next video meeting. It explores the relationship between limitations and creativity and is based on Move Together (pg 168) and Concentric Mirrors (pg 315).

1. Explain that each person will take a (roughly)15 second turn to make a series of motions using only their hands and fingers. No head, arm, neck, or body movements are allowed. Everyone else will mirror back the hand movements.

2. Ask for a volunteer to go first. Have everyone put their arms up, bent at the elbows (can rest elbows on table) with their hands between their face and the camera. The volunteer makes movements using only their hands and fingers without moving any other body part for about 15 seconds and everyone follows.

3. After about 15 seconds, the leader passes it to another person by calling their name. That person is the new leader. Play continues until everyone has had a turn.

Process: Did people do the same movements or different ones? It's amazing how many different ways people thought to move even with so many constraints. Sometimes limitations help us increase our creativity. The pandemic has forced us to find new ways to operate and accomplish the same goals. Even after we "return to normal" we might want to continue to use some of these new ways and ideas.

Also, different people had really different ideas about how to respond to the limitations and still accomplish the goal. Shared leadership allows us to generate and try new, creative ideas and use the strengths of an entire group of people to arrive at the best ways to achieve our goals.