Two Zero-Prep Meeting Openers that Spark Laughter

Activity Ideas 22 Sep 2026 forum 0 Comments

Woman opening meeting at table of colleagues 2to1

The Meeting That Nobody Was Excited About

You know this meeting. Everyone’s been in it. The calendar invite lands, the location is a familiar room, and by the time people start filing in, the energy is somewhere between polite and flat. Not hostile. Not even particularly disengaged. Just… not really there yet.

Most facilitators and team leaders push straight to the agenda in this moment, which means the work begins before the people do.

There’s a better way to start. And it takes less than two minutes.

Kram Dralloc

The opener that earns immediate laughter

The first activity is called Kram Dralloc. In small groups – or the whole group if size allows – ask everyone to say their name out loud, but spelled backwards.

Then invite the group to speculate where in the world a person with that name would live. That’s all there is to it.

What happens next is difficult to predict in terms of specific answers, and entirely predictable in terms of result: laughter. The combinations that emerge from even a modest-sized group — the invented geographies, the confident mispronunciations, the deadpan speculation — are reliably funny. The activity is silly in the best possible way, and silliness, wielded well, is one of the most effective tools in a facilitator’s arsenal.

ps: he inverse of Mark Collard is Kram Dralloc. Danish, I think?

Archival Memories

The opener that catches people off-guard

The second activity is different in almost every way. Everyone picks up their smartphone and opens their photo gallery. The prompt is simple: scroll to your most recent photo – or to a nominated date – and share the story behind it with a partner.

No props, no preparation, no facilitation required after the initial instruction. What happens next is a series of unexpectedly warm, personal, entirely genuine conversations.

People share moments from their week, from a recent trip, from a birthday or a Tuesday evening — whatever happens to have been captured last.

The reason it works so consistently is that it asks nothing contrived of people. The photo is already there. The story is real. The conversation flows naturally from something that actually happened.

Two Openers, One Purpose

Kram Dralloc is laugh-out-loud funny. Archival Memories is quietly meaningful. Used on different occasions, they give you two distinct ways to shift the tone of a meeting before the agenda begins.

Together, they make the case for something I genuinely believe: every gathering, however routine, deserves a moment at the start that reminds people they’re in the company of other humans. These two activities create that moment, efficiently and reliably.

Give ’em a go, have fun.

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