What's Outside - Icebreaker
What's Outside - Icebreaker is a team reflection exercise for reflection and learning: it helps participants reflect on experience and turn observations into learning.
How to run it
- Tell participants to look out of their window and to take it in turns to describe what they see.
- Demonstrate this activity by going first. You could describe the weather, scenery, building, people, animals, birds etc. The idea is that you are giving people an idea of the location you are working from.
- Then ask each participant to describe their own location and continue until everyone has spoken.
- Ask participants to support their description with a picture taken from their mobile phone. You could ask them to take the picture in advance, as a pre-training or pre-meeting activity.
- An alternative is to ask participants to describe the room they are working in
Run this exercise live
The facilitator console stays in this browser. Its QR handoff is a short-lived participant snapshot containing only public exercise instructions, phase, prompt, and timer state.
What participants need now
Materials:
This is a participant-safe snapshot, not a response form. It sends nothing back to the facilitator.
Prompts to use +
Tell participants to look out of their window and to take it in turns to describe what they see.
Demonstrate this activity by going first. You could describe the weather, scenery, building, people, animals, birds etc. The idea is that you are giving people an idea of the location you are working from.
Then ask each participant to describe their own location and continue until everyone has spoken.
Ask participants to support their description with a picture taken from their mobile phone. You could ask them to take the picture in advance, as a pre-training or pre-meeting activity.
An alternative is to ask participants to describe the room they are working in
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: What's Outside - Icebreaker. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: Tell participants to look out of their window and to take it in turns to describe what they see.; Demonstrate this activity by going first. You could describe the weather, scenery, building, people, animals, birds etc. The idea is that you are giving people an idea of the location you are working from.; Then ask each participant to describe their own location and continue until everyone has spoken.; Ask participants to support their description with a picture taken from their mobile phone. You could ask them to take the picture in advance, as a pre-training or pre-meeting activity.. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The current corpus has one observed source organization: TrainerBubble. (1 source observed, including TrainerBubble.)
- 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.