Celebrity Interview
Celebrity Interview is a prompted conversation exercise for relationship mapping: it helps participants build useful connections and understand how people, roles, or ideas relate.
How to run it
- Interviewer welcomes and introduces the celebrity and topic to be discussed. 3 min.
- Interviewer asks questions that the audience would be expected to ask (both humor and gravity are appropriate). 15-30 min.
- Invite participants to generate additional questions in a 1-2-4 conversation and then on 3-by-5-inch cards. 5-10 min.
- Interviewer sifts the cards, looking for patterns and asking additional questions to the celebrity. 5-10 min.
- Interviewer makes closing comments, thanks the celebrity. 1 min.
- Create or boost a connection between an expert or leader and an audience
- Give substance and depth to a topic
- Avoid boring lectures and PowerPoint presentations
- 2+20-40 mins None ← Back to all Activities Setup Divide the class into pairs.
- With advanced students, you could show a clip of a late-night talk show (Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel etc.) to give them topic ideas.
Run this exercise live
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Materials:
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Prompts to use +
Interviewer asks questions that the audience would be expected to ask (both humor and gravity are appropriate). 15-30 min.
Invite participants to generate additional questions in a 1-2-4 conversation and then on 3-by-5-inch cards. 5-10 min.
Create or boost a connection between an expert or leader and an audience
Give substance and depth to a topic
With advanced students, you could show a clip of a late-night talk show (Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel etc.) to give them topic ideas.
Run this with your AI assistant +
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.
Adapt this exercise for my exact room. Exercise: Celebrity Interview. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: Interviewer asks questions that the audience would be expected to ask (both humor and gravity are appropriate). 15-30 min.; Invite participants to generate additional questions in a 1-2-4 conversation and then on 3-by-5-inch cards. 5-10 min.; Create or boost a connection between an expert or leader and an audience; Give substance and depth to a topic. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The strongest current observations come from Liberating Structures; aggregators are listed as additional observations, not origin proof. (3 sources observed, including Liberating Structures, ESL Active, SessionLab.)
- What that means: we track where an exercise has been observed in public sources. We do not claim to know who created it, or how popular it is.
- No efficacy claims: appearing in this library is not a claim that the exercise is proven effective. Facilitator judgment and context decide whether it works for a given room.
- Corrections: if you have evidence of an earlier or more accurate source, read our methodology and trust boundary and tell us.