A frisbee, a hawk, some spaghetti, and information overload.
Knife, Hawk, Spaghetti is an improv game usually used for warming up the performers in practice or before a show. You would likely never see this game during an actual improv show, as it’s a game to get performers minds and bodies warmed up, and doesn’t play well on a stage.
It’s one of my favorites as it forces you to lock in on the present moment, and play with complexity. It goes like this:
Everyone stands in a circle.
One person makes eye contact with someone across the circle, and pantomimes throwing a knife at them, yelling “Die!” as they throw the knife. The other person catches the knife mid-air and yells “not today!”.
You run that through the group until everyone has had the chance to throw and catch the knife. Pause the knife, then introduce the hawk.
One person starts by pantomiming a hawk on their forearm. They make eye contact with another person, and yell “hawk”! The other person makes the same pantomime pose, and yells “come hawk”! The first person launches the hawk and the second person catches it.
Give everyone a chance to throw and catch the hawk. Then pause and introduce spaghetti.
One person starts by pantomiming holding a big pot of spaghetti and mixing it with a big spoon. They walk across the circle and offer the spaghetti to someone else and ask “do you want some spaghetti”, the other person replies “not today” but takes the spaghetti anyway. The second person walks across the circle to repeat the bit, while the first person takes the seconds place. Repeat until everyone has had a chance to give and take the spaghetti.
Now you repeat the knife. As the knife is traveling around, you bring in the hawk. As those are traveling around, you bring in the spaghetti.
Chaos and pandemonium. I love it.
There are three distinct channels of communication, and the people in the circle are not staying in the same spots. This is an exercise that is built to fail by design.
I love bringing this warm up into workshops for teams and business too. I typically replace knife with a frisbee to focus on non-violent communication. It works just as well as the knife and it keeps the space safe.
There’s too much happening at one time to have the game sustain for a lengthy period of time. Plus people laugh a lot. It helps bring down some peoples self-imposed barriers, and be a little vulnerable with each other.
Seeing people experience being uncomfortable in a safe space is one of the great things about these workshops (if I do say so myself).
When I ask participants how did that feel or what did you experience, the theme of the answers is I felt information overload or how multitasking is harmful.
One participant said:
Multi-tasking causes confusion and contributes to “dropping the ball”.
I then ask them to consider all the inboxes they have at work. Email, Microsoft Teams or Slack (or both!), internal web pages/blogs, mountains of wiki pages, the sneaker-net (people popping by your desk to chat/water cooler conversations).
Then I ask how did the frisbee, hawk, and spaghetti experience inform you on how you can manage the information overload?
Answers typically are:
You can’t manage it
Scan the horizon, don’t dig too deep on them all
Some teams decide to divide up to focus on one ‘channel’ for a week or sprint, then rotate
You can’t manage information overload, but playing with it leads to some great insights and actions.
—
If someone forwarded you this and you like it, join the newsletter: