Start/stop

Intention The intention of this energizer is to bring attention to the room, to ourselves, to group dynamics, to play with group dynamics, and to reflect on leadership as something that happens between actual people. How There are 4 levels to this exercise. Let each step be done a few times to get the feel of the difference between the different steps. Allow more time in the last step to see what happens. Facilitator: "Start walking around in the room in a neutral way. Be aware of balancing out the room. (Imagine that you are all walking on a raft that have to be balanced out, or else it will be flipped, to use the whole space.)" 1. When the facilitator says stop, everyone freeze. When the facilitator says start, everyone start moving again. 2. Now anyone can say stop / start which means everyone has to stop / start

3. Now it's not allowed to say anything but anyone can physically stop or start, which means everyone has to be very aware of what's going on around them. 4. Now anyone can do anything they want, and follow the lead of anyone the want. (E.G Dance, sing, physically move ) Reflection There are a lot of insights that can be drawn from this simple exercise, especially the last part. Here are some questions you can ask: - What happened in the room? Why? - Can we learn something about leadership from here? - How did you decide who to follow? - Did you focus more on others or yourself? - How did everybody else's actions influence what you decided to do? There are many ways in which we influence each other, we follow each other in different ways and for different reasons. In another room, with another group of people, something else would have happened. How leadership works in this room is dependent on each of us, what we bring with us, our assumptions, habits, what we think about ourselves, and what we think of other people here.