Increased flexibility
Your Weekly Icebreaker
Last week, I attended the Culture Conference’s “Offsite for Offsites” — a day-long conference with other facilitators and brilliant minds who focus on building connection among teams. Needless to say, it was invigorating.
During the day, we talked about one of my favorite paradigms for approaching connection building: Karl Rohnke’s “comfort, stretch, panic” model. In short, the model has three zones:
Comfort: This is the place where folks feel confident and at ease, but little learning or innovation usually takes place here. Stay here too long, and people can become bored or disengaged.
Stretch: This zone lies just beyond your comfort zone and is where people are challenged to learn and grown. Your stretch zone can be slowly expanded over time. The more you stretch, the more you grow.
Panic: This is the stress zone, where people feel out of control and might move into a fight or flight response. Instead of engaging with challenges, people often shut down.
When you’re bringing people together to connect, you want to meet them in the “comfort” zone and gradually move them into a stretch zone — pushing on the boundaries of their “stretch” slowly, while avoiding moving into “panic.”
So what does this have to do with icebreakers? Everything, really.
Icebreakers are a valuable tool, both for meeting people in their comfort zone, and also moving them to stretch. So today, I wanted to share some examples of icebreakers you can use in “comfort” and “stretch” to gradually grow deeper connection with your team.
Comfort Icebreakers
These icebreakers are more surface level and don’t require deeper vulnerability. They’re great for meeting people where they are at the start of an engagement or early in a team’s tenure:
What's your go-to comfort food?
What was your dream job when you were a kid?
What do you have too many of?
Stretch Icebreakers
These prompts go a level deeper, but still provide some optionality for people to share as they’re comfortable within their own “stretch” zone. These are great for deepening personal connection during an event or as a team better gets to know one another:
What are you giving yourself credit for this week?
What is giving you joy and energy right now?
Who are the mentors that have meant the most to you in your career?
As you pick a prompt for your next meeting or gathering, think about where you want to meet — or push — your team, and what icebreaker best serves that goal.
Until next week!
Danielle