Anecdote, the Australian story-based consultancy, offered a neat idea in its latest newsletter — using name badges as story prompts. Suggesting this activity as an icebreaker for folks meeting the first time or that don’t know each other well, Anecdote instructs:

Ask everyone to write something interesting or quirky about themself on a name tag or post-it and wear it as a badge. … Allow 10 min for the group to mingle and hear as many stories they can that reveal the choice of words people have used and in doing so learn something interesting about each other.

Anecdote suggests these as possibilities for the name badges:

• your nickname
• sports you love to play or watch
• the [sports] team you follow (Anecdote suggested football team, which, of course, means soccer in most of the world.)
• your favourite biography
• what’s on the cover of your diary
• a thought-provoking quote
• your personal motto
• the beginning of an interesting story

Anecdote notes that Margaret Moon suggested a variation of this technique as an in-house team-building activity:

Ask people to write [on a post-it] a fact about themselves (a skill or talent) that their team members may or may not know about. Cluster the post-its on a wall. Invite participants to guess who the post-its might represent.

I like these activities a lot because they make the most out name badges (presumably, names are also included along with the tidbits on the badges; imagine how well your memory of each person’s name can be reinforced by looking at the other information on the name badge). These are great ways of integrating networking and storytelling.