(This exercise was co-created as part of a collaboration day between myself and Geoff Watts.)
Timings:
About 5-10 mins for new teams, longer for more mature teams or creative types
Dead easy to set up, quick and very fun. Even more fun over beers. Sit the team in a circle. Ask the team for a boy or girl’s name, a household object and a location. Write down this down somewhere visible if required.
The team must then make a story by only speaking one word at a time and going around the circle.
Rules:
- The story must “flow”
- Players can add the words “full stop” to indicate a new sentence
- The story elements the team chose must be used
Learning points:
Collaboration & Emergence. Players must be able to build on the previous word successfully. Nobody knows what the story will look like at the start, and it changes based on peoples own input. Some players will throw in “bad” words which are difficult to build on. These are BLOCKS. A good collaborator can turn a BLOCK into an OFFER which allows the next players to build the story more easily and create flow.
