Kick The Duck, Red Rover exercise
A group of people can take the stage and confidently navigate chaos by focusing outward, seeking symmetries, making differences matter and clarifying sequences of cause and effect through repetition.
How to run it
- Someone will use gibberish to direct other players’ actions - Stop them and remind them to lead by following
- Empower Asymmetries - How do the different groupings relate? Make the asymmetries that exist matter. How does one group react to the other? What does one group do to another?
- Have the group shake it off, walk around the room and then, when teacher says “go,” start a new game focused on Seeking Symmetries and Empowering Asymmetries.
- Stop and ask them to walk you through what happened, with players explaining what they saw and what they did in response. Tease out “When X happened, Y happened.”
- Everyone is necessarily “playing by their own rules” - but if each individual is committed to simplifying and clarifying then a group direction will emerge.
- If you’re ever lost, return to what was done before - engage a rule again. Restart the sequence. Going through a game again will build clarity and simplifies the amount of stuff in play.
- After they have a great game, they are likely to have a game become super sloppy because they got too excited and stopped leading by following.
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Prompts to use +
Someone will use gibberish to direct other players’ actions - Stop them and remind them to lead by following
Have the group shake it off, walk around the room and then, when teacher says “go,” start a new game focused on Seeking Symmetries and Empowering Asymmetries.
Stop and ask them to walk you through what happened, with players explaining what they saw and what they did in response. Tease out “When X happened, Y happened.”
Everyone is necessarily “playing by their own rules” - but if each individual is committed to simplifying and clarifying then a group direction will emerge.
If you’re ever lost, return to what was done before - engage a rule again. Restart the sequence. Going through a game again will build clarity and simplifies the amount of stuff in play.
After they have a great game, they are likely to have a game become super sloppy because they got too excited and stopped leading by following.
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: Kick The Duck, Red Rover exercise. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: Someone will use gibberish to direct other players’ actions - Stop them and remind them to lead by following; Have the group shake it off, walk around the room and then, when teacher says “go,” start a new game focused on Seeking Symmetries and Empowering Asymmetries.; Stop and ask them to walk you through what happened, with players explaining what they saw and what they did in response. Tease out “When X happened, Y happened.”; Everyone is necessarily “playing by their own rules” - but if each individual is committed to simplifying and clarifying then a group direction will emerge.. 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 Improv Does Best; aggregators are listed as additional observations, not origin proof. (1 source observed, including Improv Does Best.)
- 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.