What you'll need
Remote
- Video conferencing with screen sharing
- Digital collaboration tool
- Dicebreakers cutout
In-Person
- Meeting space
- Whiteboard or butcher paper
- Index cards
- Markers
- Dicebreakers cutout
Instructions for running this Play
Pull any of the following icebreaker activities out of your hat in any order while waiting for people to trickle into a meeting, during onboardings and trainings, at the beginning of offsites, or any time you want to put people at ease and spark creativity. Have fun!
Super quick icebreaker questions
Have an extra minute or two? These thought-provoking questions make fantastic, fun icebreakers.
QUESTIONS WITH PURPOSE
Make people think, get conversations started, and warm up before tough brainstorming sessions.
1. What would be the title of your autobiography?
- Theme: Summarizing complex events or concepts.
- Purpose: Preparing for activities like crafting a vision statement.
2. If you were a superhero, what would you call yourself?
- Theme: Naming stuff is hard!
- Purpose: Practicing packing a lot of info into a single, evocative word or phrase. This is a killer icebreaker for marketing teams!
3. Who was your first mentor, and what qualities made them a good (or lousy) one?
- Theme: Teamwork and support are important.
- Purpose: Reinforcing the idea that relying on each other is part of growth. Use this icebreaker for projects or teams with lots of dependencies, and during leadership meetings.
4. Have you ever called customer service to complain? What happened?
- Theme: Empathizing with customers.
- Purpose: Putting everyone into an empathetic state of mind before discussing trade-offs or designing a new user experience.
5. What's one thing you learned from a project that went wrong?
- Theme: Failures are learning opportunities
- Purpose: Focusing on risk identification and mitigation.
JUST-FOR-FUN QUESTIONS
Spark conversation, especially in less formal meetings. You can also print and assemble one of our dicebreakers for a little extra fun.
- What animal would you choose to be, and why?
- What's the last dream you remember?
- How do you let teammates know you're in deep work mode?
- Where would you vacation if money were no object?
- What are your favorite books, magazines, or podcasts?
- What car did you use to learn how to drive?
- What's one thing you're grateful for today?
- When you read or watch TV, do you go for fiction or non-fiction?
- Do you prefer coffee, tea, or soda?
- Can you remember a bumper sticker that made you smile?
FILL IN THE BLANKS
Get to know new coworkers or teammates.
I have never ________________.
My friends love me for my ________________.
If my pet could talk, it would say ________________.
One ____________ is better than ten ________________.
Icebreaker activities for meetings, offsites, and more
Loosen up and get engaged with these fun icebreakers for meetings.
Exorcize the demons 10 MIN
Juice up your neural pathways before brainstorming or problem-solving, and have a few belly laughs. Best for groups of three or more.
- Introduce the topic you'll be brainstorming about, or the problem you'll be trying to solve.
- Using a whiteboard or butcher paper — or, for remote teams, a digital collaboration tool — ask the group to write down their worst ideas.
- After a few minutes, step back and take 'em all in (we dare you not to fall on the floor laughing!).
- (Optional) Ask each person to share their favorite worst idea and why it stood out to them.
This exercise helps teams resist the (often strong) temptation to self-censor when real problem-solving begins. After you’ve heard the worst ideas and flushed them out of your system, you can proceed with your regularly scheduled brainstorming.
Mystery person group sort 15-30 MIN
Kickstart creative thinking and see different thought processes in action. Best for large groups of 20 or more.
- Each person writes a surprising fact about themselves on an index card and drops their cards into a bag, box, or hat.
- Each person chooses a card at random from the bag.
- Now the fun begins. Participants stand up and mingle, with the goal of finding cards that align with a theme or are of a similar type. Keep an open mind when thinking about what constitutes the common thread between cards. The thread could be daredevil tendencies, origin stories, music, or anything else. There's no limit to how big each grouping can be, but you must find groupings that accommodate all the cards — nobody gets left out.
- Each group reads their cards and shares the theme they identified.
- (Optional) Invite everyone to stand up and re-sort themselves. Some groupings will likely stay the same, while others might be dramatically different.
Notice how the point of the exercise was not to figure out which fact goes with which person? That's on purpose. In fact, remember to let participants know this at the beginning of the exercise in order to stave off any anxieties.
Telephone charades 15 MIN
Warm up for a day of listening with this non-verbal activity. Best for groups of 10 or more.
- Divide into teams of five to eight people.
- Ask one team to come to the front of the room and stand in a line, one behind the other, all facing the same direction (it's important no one can see the person standing behind them).
- Show the person at the back of the line a word to act out silently, but don't have them do so just yet. Show the word to the audience as well so they know what's up, but make sure nobody else in the line sees it.
- When the person at the back of the line is ready, they tap the shoulder of the person standing in front of them. That person turns around and faces the person who knows the word.
- The actor pantomimes the word as best they can two or three times so the person watching can really absorb and memorize the movements. Do not let anyone say the word being acted out!
- The person watching then becomes the actor – they tap the person in front of them and repeat the pantomime as best they can. (You see where this is going, right?)
- Repeat steps four to six until everyone in the line has seen the pantomime.
- Laugh as the pantomime morphs dramatically from the original.
- The person at the front of the line tries to guess the original word. If they get it right, the team scores a point. It’s up to you how strict you want to be!
Make sure each team gets a chance to act. You can continue as long as you like. Here are some example words your teams can act out: mermaid, lawn sprinkler, firefighter, Gollum, light bulb, snow shovel, jet ski, surfer, walkie-talkie, or frying pan.
Three things 5-10 MIN
Trigger quick, unfiltered thinking before a brainstorming session with this fast-paced activity. Best for groups of five or more.
- Circle up and choose a person to kick things off – we'll call them Person A.
- Person A turns to the person next to them, person B, and names a category, like "types of sandwiches.”
- Person B rattles off three things that fit into that category as fast as they can. No judgment and no self-censoring!
- When they're done, the entire group claps and yells, "Three things!"
- Go around the circle until everyone has had a chance to name a category and three things.
The point isn't to make sure all things named fit the category perfectly, or to come up with the wittiest response. The point is to laugh and have fun. Let your brain relax so your neurons can fire quickly. Celebrate even the oddest contributions and you’ll set an anything-goes tone before diving into more cerebral, strategic activities.