Interview 011 - Kerri Price

Beyond Icebreakers Uncut

00:00 / 1:19:22

Why “The Wisdom Is Always in the Room”

Kerri Price is the founder of The Facilitators Network in New Zealand, where members from around the world gather online several times a month to sharpen their facilitation craft. She’s been facilitating meetings and workshops for over two decades, much of it in the local government and community engagement space, and is currently finishing her book, “The Accidental Facilitator,” due out around April or May next year.

This conversation keeps coming back to one idea: the activity is never the thing, the space around it is. Kerri argues that icebreakers, ice melters, warm-ups, whatever you call them, fail not because the activity is wrong but because facilitators treat connection as a checkbox instead of something built deliberately, moment by moment, sometimes before people even walk in the room. From there the conversation moves through her SPACE framework, choice versus forced participation, how to safely build toward vulnerability, and lands, unexpectedly, on why every facilitator needs therapy.

Why Kerri calls icebreakers a “tick box activity” facilitators run without knowing why
The “accidental facilitator” problem: people handed facilitation duties with zero training
Her belief that “great facilitation can really change the world”
Her SPACE framework for what a facilitator creates: Safe, Pondering, Alignment, Contained, Engaging
“Holding the purpose tightly and the plan loosely” — her metaphor for staying flexible
The “week from now, year from now” activity for reluctant, mandated participants
Her BEAT framework for shared responsibility: be open-minded, engage, take action
Why she hasn’t touched a slide in over a decade, after her “worst workshop of my life”
Her rule: get people talking within the first three minutes of a session
The problem with “go around the room” intros — poor Mary, still waiting 25 minutes in
Why she replaced turn-taking with “popcorning” to preserve choice and agency
The “blue cheese continuum,” a low-stakes spectrum activity for conflict-heavy teams
How she became “the seventh table leg lady,” a funding story a stranger remembered years later
Her 30-30-30 rule: activity, debrief, and her talking each get a third of the time
Why she believes an experiential activity can never truly “flop”
The subtle shift from “what else?” to “is there anything else?” to signal last call
Chad Littlefield’s question for Kerri: “what’s the story that is no longer serving you?”
A LEGO Serious Play session where Kerri’s own vulnerability let a leader disclose his wife’s cancer
Why she believes every facilitator in emotionally charged work needs therapy
Calling out versus calling in harmful comments, and why it starts with knowing your own triggers