Play an icebreaker game

Designing and modeling collaboratively often pulls groups of people together that may not have worked together before. They may be more accustomed to a stuffier more formal meeting approach where a presenter speaks, and everyone else listens, or quietly gets a little work done on their laptops. During a collaborative design meeting they'll be asked to get up and move around, talk with each other, write information on cards or stickies, place that information into models, and discuss with others what the information means.

While it's helpful to prepare attendees for a collaborative modeling session by discussing what will happen, and how to perform many of the techniques they'll need in the meeting, if they've never done this work before, it's difficult to imagine. Often a discussion on modeling mechanics result in participants focusing on modeling mechanics. While trying to build a model to represent important information, first time participants often focus more on these modeling mechanics than the information they're trying to model. This doesn't help the quality of the model much.

A short icebreaking game gives participants an opportunity to learn the modeling techniques by practicing them. They'll learn the techniques while building a simple model that doesn't have the impact or consequences associated with it that a model related do the software they're designing might. In addition to learning modeling techniques, they'll get practice working with each other collaboratively. And, given the right game, participants will learn a little about each other as well.

The favorite movie affinity

• Ask participants to write on index cards using marker their three favorite movies one movie per card
• When everyone is complete, ask them one at a time to read them aloud and place the movie in the middle of the table. When placing a card on the table, if their movie is the same or similar to someone else's place it close by.
• When all movies are in the model, ask the group to rearrange the model clustering movies that are similar to each other close together and movies very different from each other farther apart.
• When the model is complete, ask everyone to pick up three pieces of candy from the table. They have three votes. Ask the framing question: "If you were stranded on a desert island and only had a iPod with three movies loaded on it, which 3 movies would they be?"

While having fun, learning about a few new movies and learning about each other, your participants have learned some basic modeling skills, affinity diagramming, and democratic prioritization. When I play this game everyone always has fun, and most make a list of a couple good movies they haven't seen before.

Starting my day timeline

• Ask participants think back to this morning and the steps they took to get ready for their day starting with the moment they woke, to the moment they left their home, apartment, or hotel room.
• Ask everyone to write out these steps using marker on index cards, one step per card. This will take a few minutes.
• On the left side of a long conference table, place a card that says "woke up" and on the right end of the table a card that says "left to come here." This will be our timeline.
• Ask everyone all at once to place their cards into the timeline. If events happen concurrently or at about the same time, place them in the same vertical axis. Otherwise arrange events chronologically left to right.
• You'll find lots of duplicates. Ask participants to stack them so the cards underneath are still showing. This way we can easily see the number of cards in a stack, and how common a step is across participants.

While having fun, and learning how many times their co-workers hit the snooze button before finally getting out of bed, participants learn modeling skills - specifically timeline modeling. They've also learned how to collaboratively consolidate data from a number of sources.