In this card, we talk about starting our meetings with a diversity based activity. Now for a start, these can make great icebreakers. They can make great warmup exercises for any meetings or workshops that you’re running, and they really serve to as well. Kind of breaking the eyes, highlight the diversity in the room.
It helps deepen relationships between colleagues and build psychological safety. So there’s a lot of good reasons to start your meetings with a diversity based activity. It also stops us just going straight to task-based agenda items. This has become all too prevalent in the last few years of the pandemic.
People just straight jump straight into the what’s to be done without taking the time to ask people how they are and spend a bit more time getting to know each other. So they provide a great mechanism for us doing that. So we’re gonna talk about three exercises here, the three listed on the card, and we’ll just give you a few things to think about and provide a bit more context and color for each one.
So the first exercise is share one thing that we wouldn’t know about you just by looking at you. So this is an open invitation to the room to share something. It could be big, it could be small, um, it could be something that maybe a few people know, but not the rest of the room. Uh, and and it’s important to frame it as such.
We’re not asking people to share anything that they’re not comfortable sharing. And you can start off by as the leader, giving your own example, uh, just to get the ball moving. So, uh, an example, just by looking at me, you wouldn’t know that I, uh, recently picked up a guitar again for the first time in many, many, many years, and, uh, started re reteaching myself to play.
So that’s something you wouldn’t know just by looking at me. And at the end we debrief by asking, who here learned something new about their colleagues? And invariably, we all walk away with a bit more context about each other’s lives, which is, which is wonderful. The second extra, uh, activity is asking people whether they sit more on the introvert or the extra extrovert, uh, ends of that particular spectrum. Now it’s handy here to start off with a definition around introversion and extroversion. It can mean a few different things to a few different people. The definition we recommend on the one we like is where do you get your energy from? If you’re more introverted, you tend to get your energy from recharging alone and, and spending time away from people.
Uh, if you’re extroverted, you tend to get energy from social situations. This doesn’t mean introverts don’t like be being with people. And it doesn’t mean extroverts can’t enjoy being alone either. Um, but it’s a, uh, it’s thinking about it in the terms in terms of energy. And while we’re asking this question again, framing you might wanna offer up the room is it can help us work better together.
So learning about people’s natural tendencies, people’s natural preferences, um, can give us some context about how they like to contribute to meetings, what tasks they might. And it’s also not always obvious that who the introverts and who the extroverts are in the room as well. And this, this, um, exercise really highlights that nicely.
I personally am more on the extroverted side of the spectrum, but I talk, I facilitate, I coach, I spend time with people for a living. So, um, I would be, I would be an ambivert, but truly I get my energy from, from recharging alone. So that serves to highlight what are, uh, sometimes. Immediately obvious or visible aspects of diversity within our team.
So that can be really, really cool to, um, to, to highlight there. And the last exercise here is, um, pairing people off and asking them to find three differences between them and the other person. Or you could go for three similarities as well. It’s the same exercise done in a slightly different way. So here we pair people off, we give them a handful of minutes to, uh, to complete the exercise.
Come back with some reflection questions. So how easy was that? How difficult was that to find, uh, different things or similar things about you and the other person? Did you, again learn something about the other person? And what this exercise really highlights beautifully is the importance of curiosity.
