Today in how to make stuff inclusive:
Icebreakers. Great example, bad idea.
Count the cost and weigh it up against the benefit.
Some things are not worth it on second thought, even if you have always done it that way.
What is the cost?
If you have staff/students with social anxiety or several other types of neurodivergence, ice breakers can cause them to shut down completely. They will need an hour to recover. And your class/meeting is 50 mins so…
For anyone else, they just don’t actually build the rapport you need. So they don’t even work.
What’s the benefit? Well… near none.
What can you do instead?
Get people started on a task together. A topic specific task. They’ll rapport themselves just fine. And that includes the ND folk. Why?
The task is not personal. It’s about work/study which is what people came to your class/meeting for. Predictable.
They gave informed consent to do this. You have buy-in automatically.
Once they talk about syntax and budgets and such, some will slip in personal stuff and start to bond and build rapport within their comfort zones. Naturally. Consensually.
Most rapport building is done via body language so that happens silently while they work. Have you ever looked at the body language of people during ice breakers? Most are tense and braced. That’s not rapport, it’s being complacent.
Lived experience:
Ice breaker I had to take part in a few weeks ago: earliest childhood memory.
Me: me mum’s husband trying to drown me in a pool.
*dead silence*
Me: And that’s the cost of ice breakers. You don’t know what people carry. Don’t assume that all your students/colleagues have a happy childhood memory you can hook on to to shortcut rapport building.
Ice breakers, real ones, are massive ships and they don’t just break the ice and hope, they have ice radar, multibeam echosounders, satellite data, etc. They know what’s under the ice. With a student or colleague, we don’t know.
Just give people a safe place in the sun, it’ll melt. Cheaper, quicker, safer and you’ll get more working minutes out of the group, too.
Playing games, but count the cost,
the ice is broken but your class is lost.
The USCG Healy (WAGB-20) breaks ice around the Russian-flagged tanker Renda 250 miles south of Nome, Alaska, Jan. 6, 2012. The Healy is the Coast Guard’s only currently operating polar icebreaker. (DoD photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Sara Francis, U.S. Coast Guard/Released)
