This is a great question to set a healthy tone about learning, discovery, and improvement — just the thing for project kick-off meetings, or at the start of a research project.

How to do it

As the facilitator, ask everyone to take turns answering the question: what’s one thing you have been learning about? You can make it more specific, e.g. "What’s something you’ve been learning about this year?" or "What’s one thing you’ve been learning about working in this team?"

This helps to set a tone of learning, and open mindset. It’s just also really interesting to hear about everyone's different perspectives. Be sure to affirm what they say, to model behaviour of encouragement.

Variations

You can do this non-verbally (and in large groups), by asking everyone to capture their answer on a sticky note (either physically or digitally) for 1 minute. Then, ask everyone to spend two minutes grouping all the sticky notes into similar categories. This helps them warm up into working together collaboratively, too!

Once this is done (and if you have time), you can always ask everyone to spend 5 minutes in the groups corresponding to the grouped sticky notes, discussing their answers, and getting to know one another better.