Just One Lie Activity

Just One Lie is an activity to help the group get to know each other better and make a long meeting some moments of light relief. This exercise is adapted from the well-known icebreaker ‘Two Truths And A Lie‘ to create an activity that you could return to throughout a meeting.

You need to have a half page of flipchart and a pad of sticky notes for each person in the meeting.

At the start, have each participant write their name at the top of their flipchart page and hang it on the wall. Then have each individual put the names of all of their colleagues on post-its, one name per post-it.

At the start of the session, ask the group to mingle, asking one another questions to get acquainted, such as “What sports do you like?” “Where do you like to take your holidays?” “What is your favourite food?”; or about their career, such as “How did you get into facilitation”, “What was your greatest facilitation achievement?”; or about the meeting, such as “What is your worst fear for this meeting?”.

Or just ask for one fact they would like to share with the group.

Tell the participants, “For every person you meet, put their name and one fact you have learned about them onto the post-it with their name. As you meet every person in the group, you should accumulate a post-it for each person.

“However, as you answer questions about yourself, please ensure that one (and only one) answer you give is a lie, something entirely not true of you.”

When everyone has accumulated one fact post-it about everyone else, have participants distribute the post-its onto each individual’s flipchart pages. Introduce yourself by reading out the flip chart page with your own name and facts, and then invite the group to guess which is a lie.

Use a red marker to identify with a tick every true fact until the lie is revealed, then put a cross to identify that. Next, introduce another participant in the same way.

By the end of the meeting, everyone should have been introduced, and all but one have introduced another.

The topics of this publication: interactions, integration, foster relationships, disinhibition, distension