CultureUsing Meeting Energizers to Keep Participants Engaged

August 19, 2018

Earlier this spring, the Cassandra Bryan Design team had the opportunity to attend a full-day innovation workshop with Duncan Wardle, the former vice president of Innovation and Creativity at The Walt Disney Company.

One of our favorite takeaways from the event was to conduct quick energizers before or during meetings to help keep everyone engaged. Below are some energizers we have tried and would suggest for your next meeting!

Three Truths, One Lie
- Just like the name says, we each thought of three (mostly fun or surprising) truths about ourselves and then one lie.
- Next, we took turns reading off our points and everyone voted on the one they thought was a lie.
- Afterward, everyone revealed the truth! We actually learned a lot about each other and had fun doing it!
Paper Telephone
- Everyone wrote a sentence or phrase at the top of their paper.
- Then we passed our papers to the right.
- Next, we illustrated the sentence we received before passing it again.
- The new recipient wrote a sentence or phrase to describe the illustration they saw.
- Eventually, we received our original papers and got to see how our original sentence or phrase had digressed, which turned out to be pretty hilarious!
Heads Up!
- After a quick download of the Heads Up! app, we broke into two teams.
- For each round, we chose a category, such as “animals.”
- The player whose turn it was each time would hold the phone on their forehead and the next word would appear. Their teammates would try to get them to guess the word by describing it or acting it out. If the player guessed a word correctly, they would tip the phone down to go on to the next word.
- One great aspect of the game is that it will record videos of participants playing, which are pretty fun to watch back after the fact!
Human Rock, Paper, Scissors
- As a group, we decided what body poses would represent “rock,” “paper” and “scissors.”
- Next, we broke into two groups and each group strategized their posing pattern.
- After the poses were decided, we played a round, which was pretty comical to see!
- After each round, we strategized again. The winners were the best out of five rounds!
Monikers
- First, we divided into two teams and each wrote a word on a card that was then added to a bag.
- In the first round, we each took turns drawing a card and saying anything we wanted to get our team to guess the word.
- In the second round, we could only use one word to get our team to guess the word.
- In the third round, we could not say anything at all— we had to use charades to get our team to guess the word.