From ice-breaker to heart-warmer

"It's not our differences that divide us. It's our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences. "

As a facilitator, I often feel the distance between an ice-breaker and what I would now call a heart-warmer. In the early years of my practice, I sought to "set things in motion": get the word flowing, activate energy, break the inertia of silence. It was useful, of course, but often superficial. I saw smiles, bodies in activity, but no real presence. Today, I see something else: a quality of connection that cannot be decreed, but must be prepared for, tamed and cultivated. And that changes everything.

Breaking the ice, as Kurt Lewin showed in his work on group dynamics (1947), is a matter of activation. It's about creating the first interactions in a temporarily frozen system. This works well on a social level: people talk, look at each other, allow each other to exist. But in this logic, play is instrumentalized. It's used to trigger, not to connect. The participant's "I" is only partially engaged: it's a question of being visible, not yet vulnerable; of participating, not yet allowing oneself to be transformed. Sometimes the ice-breaker is tacky, clumsy, infantilizing; it's nonsense.

Over time, I began to conceive of these liminal moments differently. I was no longer looking to break the ice, but to open up a space in which the group could feel itself, in its singularities, its vibrations, its porosity. That's when I discovered what I call heart-warmers. The term may sound naive, but it reflects a shift from a social act to a symbolic gesture. The aim is no longer to make people do something, but to make them feel something. In this context, play takes on the function of the transitional area defined by Donald Winnicott (1971), that in-between place where we are no longer entirely in the real or the fictitious, but in a possible space for experimenting with ourselves and others.

At such moments, play ceases to be a tool; it becomes a space. A space for the "I" to discover itself differently, through the body, through emotion, sometimes through silence. I've seen circles transformed because a playful exercise had enabled someone to express themselves without words, through a gesture, a look, an attention. I realized then, as Philippe Meirieu (2014) explained, that education is first and foremost a matter of encounter. And that the educational framework, like the facilitation framework, is what makes this encounter possible - or not.

From this perspective, the "we" does not pre-exist. It is built, slowly, in the interweaving of sensitivity and mutual attention. As Henri Tajfel (1982) has shown, collective identity is a construct, a process in the making. What I'm aiming for in a collective intelligence workshop is not simply production, but the emergence of this fragile and necessary us. And for this, the heart-warmer is a threshold, a passageway to another quality of being together.

I realize that this way of entering the workshop represents a paradigm shift. Where activity used to seek to provoke, heart-warming seeks to welcome. This presupposes an ethical posture (Cristol, 2025), a form of "care" in the sense proposed by Joan Tronto (1993): paying attention, taking care, creating an environment where everyone can exist fully. It also implies a sensitivity to what Hartmut Rosa (2016) calls resonance: the ability to enter into a relationship with what surrounds us, in a way that is not instrumental, but deeply engaged.

The benefits for facilitation are immense. Where we once sought to "make group" through activity, we now seek to "make milieu" through relationship. And this shift changes the nature of the decisions, ideas and cooperative ventures that emerge. It's not just more efficient; it's more humane. And in a world in tension, I believe this is precisely what we need.

Sources

Cristol, D; (2025). Ethique de la facilitation. L'harmattan.

Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. Human Relations, 1(1), 5-41.

Meirieu, P., Daviet, E., Dubet, F., Peloux, I., Stiegler, B., Desarthe, A., ... & Benameur, J. (2014). The pleasure of learning. Autrement,. Rosa, H. (2016). Résonance: Une sociologie de la relation au monde. La Découverte.

Tajfel, H. (1982). Social identity and intergroup relations. Cambridge University Press.

Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.