Introductions as fruits

If a couple of people don’t know each other, this is a very lightweight ice-breaking activity to make an introduction round. It ensures everyone has their ego left outside of the session and it won’t stand on the way to effective teamwork.

Moderation Steps:

1. Explain the importance of effective collaboration at upcoming session. To contribute to that, exercise will do some ego clearance that could stand on the way.
2. Everyone has a minute to chooses a fruit or vegetable they want to put next to their name.
3. Run an introduction round, where people say their names and a fruit they chose, supporting with the reason why the fruit was chosen. So it will sound like “Marcus, the orange, because I like orange juice the most; Daniela, the kiwi, because it reminds me of a bird; and so on”.
4. As soon as the round is over, thank everyone and move to the next activity.

Variations:

It’s more fun if you visualise your fruit first. In this case you should add a couple of minutes for that:

1. For collocated session you can draw on a post-it notes. It would take 3 minutes.
2. For remote sessions:
   • You use a free drawing service like https://www.autodraw.com or https://sketch.io/sketchpad/ and in this case reserve an extra few minutes for sharing, around 5 minutes in total.
   • If all of you draw in the same tool, you save time as don’t need to upload pictures anywhere. The challenge is choosing the right tool. For example, drawing with https://jamboard.google.com/ isn’t the best experience.
3. You can upload your fruits without drawing. For example, to Google slides, but drawing fruits isn’t hard, come on 😉