This is such a simple question, but can unlock so much: connection, imagination, humour, inspiration... what’s not to like?

How to do it

Pose the question to your group: “If you could travel to anywhere in the world, where would you go, and why?”, and then ask everyone to take a minute answering.

This is of course an easy question to help everybody get to know each other better, and it doesn’t take long (5 minutes for a smallish group). But you might like to also use it as a way to help people build their listening and synthesis skills. After everybody has had their turn, ask your group questions like:

• What patterns did you notice?
• Were there any responses that surprised you? Why was that?
• Were there any patterns in the way everybody else responded, when each person gave their answer?

Variations

If you have a large group (i.e. more than 10), consider pairing people up, and giving each pair 3 minutes to answer the question together. If time, you can help integrate the group together better by asking each pair to introduce their partner and their partner’s response to the question.

You could also try adding in constraints (especially if the group knows each other pretty well already), e.g.:

• If you had to move to somewhere else in the world, where would you go, and why?
• If you could travel to anywhere in the world, but you were alone / had to take your whole family...?
• If you could travel anywhere in our state/country...?

If you have a large group, and you are meeting online, you could try displaying an image of the map of the earth in an online canvas (such as Mural, Miro, or LucidSpark), and ask everybody to place a sticky on where they would like to travel to.