Common and Unique

Create groups of 4-5 people, and let them discover what they have in common, along with interesting characteristics that are unique to a person in the group.
Duration: 20m - 30m
Participants: 10 - 20
Robert from SessionLabby 

Goal

It promotes unity as it gets people to realize that they have more common ground with their peers than they first might realize. As people become aware of their own unique characteristics, they can also help people feel empowered to offer the group something unique.

Materials

    Instructions

    Form groups of five to eight people and give them two sheets of paper and a pencil or pen. The first part of the activity is Commonalities, where each subgroup compiles a list of the things they have in common. In order for it to make the list, it must apply to everyone in the subgroup. You want to avoid writing things that people can see (e.g. “everyone has hair,” or “we are all wearing clothes”). Try to get them to dig deeper. After about 5 minutes, have a spokesperson from each subgroup read their list.

    Then, depending on your goals for the session, you can have half of each subgroup rotate to another group for Uniquities or you can leave everyone in the same group. On the second sheet of paper have them record uniquities, meaning that each item applies to only one person in the group. The group tries to find at least 2 uniquities for each person. After 5-7 minutes, you can have each person say one of their uniquities or have a person read them one by one, having others try to guess who it was. (Again, you want to go beyond the superficial, avoiding those things that people can readily see).

    Author

    Robert is the co-founder of SessionLab, an online platform that helps people design and facilitate better meetings. Besides developing SessionLab, time to time he also facilitates various workshops and training sessions and particularly enjoys process design for large group workshops. He was trained as a facilitator and internal soft skills trainer by BEST, a European youth NGO, where he conducted soft skill training sessions, facilitated strategic meetings, and designed and delivered train-the-trainer programmes within the organisation. During his years as a business process consultant, he got familiar with facilitating operative and strategic business meetings and large group workshops.

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