Drawing Through Yes & No

‘Drawing Through Yes & No’ will see teams work together to enable one of the group to draw a picture as accurately as possible. However, the one doing the drawing won’t know the brief and can only ask yes/no questions from their team. How detailed are the questions they ask? Are they good at drawing from the information given when they can only have closed answers? Let’s find out!

Tools Required

• A picture for each group – as complex or simple as you wish!
• Flip Chat for each group
• Pens for each group

Method

1. Start by splitting everyone into groups of 3-6 people. Ensure you have at least 2 groups.

2. ---

   Get each team to decide on their artist and gather the necessary pens & flip chart.

3. ---

   Explain that the artist is not allowed to see the original picture at any point.

4. ---

   Explain to the rest of the team that they are only allowed to answer YES or NO to any questions from their designated artist.

5. ---

   Set a time box for the exercise. Depending on the detail in the picture, we suggest 5 – 15 minutes.

6. ---

   After the time is up, review the teams’ drawings and pick a winner! You can also ask some reflective questions:

   How did the artist find it the task?

   How different are the pictures from the original but also from the other teams pictures?

   How did the team cope only being able to respond with a YES or NO?

Takeaways

The ‘Drawing Through Yes & No’ icebreaker is a great way to get people to work together to draw out key information to enable them to complete the work required. How frustrated did they get? Ask them to think of a time when by changing their questions, they could have changed their own (or someone else’s) understanding of something?

“Questions have the power to unlock new thinking, new understanding and new levels of productivity.”

Closed questions have limitations and can cause frustration within teams, so although this energiser activity can provide a fun game to get teams warmed up, it does provide some powerful learnings too.