Icebreakers – Heraldry and Compairs

I’m in Amsterdam for a meetup for my new team at Automattic.

When we’ve not been out tackling escape rooms, finding geocaches, and eating curry, we’ve been doing a variety of activities to help solidify our new team’s goals, priorities, and expertise: y’know, the normal things you might expect on a company away week.

I volunteered to lead the initial session on our first day with a couple of icebreaker games, which went well enough that I’m inclined to share them here in case they’re of any use to you. The games we played are called Heraldry and Compairs. Let’s take a look:

Heraldry

I was looking at the coat of arms of Noord Holland, the province in which Amsterdam lies, and thinking about all the symbolism and propaganda that’s encoded into traditional heraldry, and how much effort it takes to decode it… unless you just, y’know, guess!

I asked each participant to divide a shield into five quadrants and draw their own coats of arms, featuring aspects of (a) their work life, (b) their personal life, (c) something they value, (d) something they’re good at, and (e) something surprising or unusual. I really wanted to keep the time pressure on and not allow anybody to overthink things, so I set a 5-minute timer from the moment everybody had finished drawing their shield outline.

Then, everybody passed their drawing to the right, and each person in turn tried, as best they could, to introduce the person to their left by attempting to interpret their neighbour’s drawing. The known categories helped to make it easier by helping people latch onto something to start talking about, but also more-challenging as people second-guessed themselves (“no, wait, maybe it’s sailing you’re good at and guitar you play in your personal life?”).

After each introduction is made, the person being introduced gets to explain their heraldry for themselves, congratulating their introducer on the things they got right and their close-guesses along the way.

It’s sort-of halfway between “introduce your neighbour” and “pictionary”. And it worked well to get us warmed-up, feeling a little silly, knowing one another slightly better, and in a space in which everybody had been expected to have spoken and to have made a harmless mistake (everybody managed to partially-interpret a shield correctly). A useful place to be at the end of an icebreaker exercise is left with the reminder that we are, after all, only human.

Compairs

Next up, we played a game only slightly inspired by witnessing a game of Mr and Mrs the other week³. I threw together a Perchance (which, in the nature of such things, is entirely open-source and you’re welcome to adapt it for your own use) that generated a series of randomly-selected pairs of teammates and asked a question to differentiate the two of them.

Participants other than the two shown on the screen were challenged to guess the answer to the question. Sometimes the questions would have a definitive answer, and sometimes not: the joy was in the speculation! “Hmm, I know that Dan’s done quite a bit of globetrotting… but could he actually have travelled further East than a colleague who lives much further East than him?”

After a few seconds to a minute, once their colleagues had settled on an answer, the people listed on the question were encouraged to make their own guesses. Usually they’ll have a better idea as they are one of the data points, but that’s not always true!

There’s no points, and you can play for as long as you like so long as it’s long enough that everybody gets at least one turn, so it’s a good “fill the rest of the time slot” game. It follows Heraldry moderately well as an icebreaker double-feature because the former is firstly about learning things about one another (and to a lesser extent guessing), and the latter is about the opposite.

I came out of both games knowing more about the humans behind the screens in my new team, and it seemed to open up the room for some good discussions afterwards, so the social lubricant effect was clearly effective too. If you give them a go or adapt them into anything else, let me know!

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