Humour in Creating Groups

One way to lighten the mood, open people's minds and de-stress people during presentations and workshops is by using humour.

There are very gentle, subtle ways of encouraging a playful or light-hearted attitude during your workshop that don't rely on telling jokes or things outside your natural personality.

It is an essential element of learning that everyone gets a chance to apply new knowledge or practise new skills. As they say "you don't learn to ride a bike by reading a manual."

When using interactive exercises, you will need to create pairs, or small groups for these interactive elements, and in doing that you easily add humour. Here are some suggestions for creating groups:

1) Using sweets - especially retro ones that cause a stir and get people talking. Have a bag with different kinds of sweets (say four of each kind if you want groups of four) and hand them around as a lucky dip. Things like refreshers, lover hearts, gob stoppers for example. If you do this at the beginning when people arrive, you can then ask them to remember the sweet they have already eaten!

2) Using badges - by badges of 70s, 80s, or even 90s bands (ebay is the perfect place to find them) and do a lucky dip again, or lay them out for people to choose. Choose the decade depending on your audience - some will remember swooning over David Cassidy or the Bay City Rollers and some would just go "who?"

If you have created pairs and want to determine who goes first, instead of just asking the group to decide, why not use the following statements to determine who goes first:

* the person with the most vowels in their full name
* the person with the longest fingernail (any finger on any hand)
* the person who has the most nieces and nephews (aunts and uncles etc)
* the person with the biggest watch
* the person with the most unusual thing in their pocket or purse

Think of some unusual methods to form groups and pick who goes first and you will add an element of surprise into your workshops, that automatically raise them above the run-of-the-mill expectations.

Good luck and please share your own ideas for forming groups here on the light the spark facebook page....

Learning By Stealth

Humour is a fantastic asset to any learning environment. It's a great way to help people learn - opening their mind, fostering creative and imaginative thinking, reducing stress, encouraging people to risks and make mistakes and it creates natural stickiness.

But boy, can it bomb.
I recall watching a new trainer deliver her first presentation. We had introduced the concept of humour as a learning tool, and she had taken that rather too literally. So she started her presentation with a joke. She was very nervous, the joke was poorly told and I am sure you can imagine the learners' reactions. Embarrassed tittering. They were now in a right state, rather than the right state.

Humour in learning does not demand that you become a stand-up comedian (or comedienne), or that you tell a stream of knock-knock jokes. It is about creating playful and imaginative scenarios, surprising your audience with the unexpected, perhaps even (if you are able) telling the occasional funny story or witty quotation.

To my mind, humour comes best when it is a reflection of your own attitude to the learning process. If you want to be playful and enjoy yourself, then your learners will generally join in. If you set yourself a goal to have fun, then you will design exercises and find materials that support that aim.

There is a great book by Steve McDermott* where he exemplifies the principles of learning by stealth. The entire book is written as series of instructions not to do. So there are suggestions as such:

• don't stop having a deep fear of failure and of making a fool of yourself
• if you do have goals (you shouldn't), don't put them in writing and if you do, don't think too big
• don't know what you value in life (and if you do, lose sight of it)

I loved this book and was reading it at a station in London, waiting for a train home, laughing so much that a man bought me a drink for cheering up his day. We talked and laughed and I missed at least one train connecting with this random stranger, who was drawn to someone laughing (or was it the way a smile makes anyone look ravishing?).

A few years ago, I designed a brief sketch on sexual discrimination at work. Instead of following a predictable path, we designed in some subtle twists. First we placed the scene in the pub, at a Christmas party (by law still a place of work) and two women made innuendos towards a male member of the audience (who we knew would respond in character). It raised some eyebrows as well as making people laugh. I am sure they remember it all the more for the twists.

You can use humour in very simple ways. If you create pairs in exercises, you can pick the person to go first (A) using suggestions such as the one with the longest little finger, the one with the most celebrity sitings in their life, the one who has the biggest head, the one with the most expensive unused kitchen gadget.... These are not necessarily inherently funny, but they are a surprise, they are lighthearted, they are playful.

Here is your challenge then - how can you be more playful in what you teach or train or learn? How could you use the opposite to help people engage in your subject?

*"How to be a complete and utter failure in life, work and everything. 39½ steps to lasting underachievement" by Steve McDermott.