The best meeting icebreaker to break the ice

Know your audience is a constant refrain. But sometimes, as a facilitator, trainer, or consultant, you may not, always, know your audience knows each other or what they will do together.

The icebreaker’s intent? Loosen things up, meet people, set the stage for effective work. Meeting icebreakers can be as painful as a bucket of ice down your shorts. Icebreakers run the risk of turning people off before you have even started the heavy lifting on why you are there.

Here is an icebreaker I have run for a least 10 years with consistent success setting up collaboration.

An organization intervention is not an organization inquisition

An organization’s present is built upon their collected history. This history is an essential core of their organization’s being. The past set the present capabilities. Rattling an organization’s history is rattling the foundation stones of an organization’s culture.

A highlight into what people do wrong attracts attention to … what people do wrong. No one likes association to something broken. No one likes it pointed out they work within, are part of, or manage broken processes.

An intervention should not open an inquisition for blame and shame, but an inquiry into the possibility of what can be.

The pain with change management

A leader’s job is to not create a space that causes so much pain that people must move, but to create a compelling future vision people are drawn to.

If leadership starts their focus on what did not work or what you do not want to happen then effort goes into putting procedures in place that constrain. If leadership focus starts on what worked or what it looks like when it worked and the focus shifts to how it worked to and what is achievable, what is possible.

Appreciative Inquiry, as a principle for design and change management, allows organizations to change the focus. Where we inquire, we move and Appreciative Inquiry changes the change.

Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success; stakeholder analysis template

A stakeholder is anyone, or group, who can positively or negatively affect the outcome of the project. This post introduces two Excel template worksheets for stakeholder identification and management.

Prior to a project’s go-ahead this template identifies groups and individuals with a stake in the success, and failure. The effort makes sure we understand the key concerns and motivations of these audiences in order to mitigate risk to over-look or under-appreciate stakeholder position.