One Word Story

𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝟐: 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐧

Over the last few years, I have led the ‘One Word Story’ activity the most (easily 100 times).

I play it with scientists, accountants, students, lawyers, entrepreneurs, all sorts. And at least half of the time, the story descends into something involving poo, farting or sex.

Yes, guys who step up to do this first, however, many females enjoy it and go along with it.

So during this activity,
• each person contributes one word each going around in a circle, to an ongoing collective growing story.
• noone knows what the next word will be, but they have to add to it.
• stay grammatical with punctuation,
• relatively keep to the storyline,
and you’ll be right.

Here’s a recent example:
It started out about finishing a job for a client (again, professional services people).
Person 1: “I”
👨🏻2: “must”
👦🏻3: “finish”
👩🏽4: “my”
👨🏻5: “return”
👩🏻‍🦰6: “for”
👨🏻‍🦳1: “Brad”
👨🏻2: “who”
👦🏻3: “insisted”
and we keep going around.

About 1-2 minutes later, the story went in and out of “someone farted, and it was so bad, we had to vacate the premises”

Sometimes I feel I need to pause it and say that ‘let’s stay away from smelly bodily functions and sexual stuff’.

This time though, I kept it going, so I could remark that “even though we are all adults and professionals, it took about one minute for us all to revert to 8 year old”

Then they realise they have ‘gone there’. Silence in the room.

I accept it.

“and that’s OK. Because the minute we allow ourselves to do it, we grab it”.

That usually relaxes things.

I have heard quite a few business people say that they don’t want other things (say corporate massage) to come in, as ‘work is for work, do that in your own time’.

Fun atmospheres are a key to a great workplace, and given permission, we will take that up.