Full Circle Associates

Andrew Rixon is asking a great question in Anecdote: How can one improvise in a virtual world?. He pinged me to see if I had anything to add, and as I started writing in the comments, I realized it was more than "comment sized" so I'm responding here.

Here are a couple:

• Use the built in chat room of a web conferencing tool to do improvised story telling - one person starts with one line, then the next person adds a line. You can do Haiku, limericks, ghost stories -- whatever. They can be themed to the domain or work of the group.
  
• Play "just three words" but ask people to really play off of the previous person's contribution. Some things that are useful online are to ask people to take three breaths before responding, so they are "listening" to the previous offering.
  
• Find a web based piece of music and ask people to open a second browser and listen to that music (or better yet, play it in the webroom). Ask for a minute of silence, then have people share what they visualize when hearing that music. Debrief about how different modalities cause us to react differently online and how that can allow us to improvise around our ruts in online spaces. (See "Adding Music to Serious Chat") The point here is not to encourage frantic, mindless response, but spontaneous improvised response.
• Ask people to take on different roles and interact as if they were those people.
• If the tool has a shared white board, ask each person to pick a color and respond using that color. This way at first people don't know who is writing what. Then ask them to change colors and try and respond the way that "color" had been responding.

For me, this question is about a) getting us out of our rote behaviors and b) using more than text or audio to assist us. I find that when we switch something, we are freed up to improvise. Like standing up for a meeting changes the dynamics from a traditional, sit down meeting. We tickle different brain cells.


See also FaciliPlay, Telephone Facilitation Tips (which describes in more detail some of the things I noted above)