there's more to connection than information
Transcript of this video:
Sometimes working with groups, I like to share activities from the world of improv theatre. And my favourite of all of these — and it’s been my favourite for at least 10 years now — I learned from my friend Simo in Helsinki. And it’s called Bunny Bunny.
When we play this game, those who choose to play — and I make these invitational, you don’t have to play — but those who choose to play stand in a circle. And I invite them all to bend their knees and bob up and down with me, and in unison, as they’re doing it, we go, “Ooh, ah, ooh, ah.” And we set up this rhythm and the whole group is doing it.
And then one person — and I usually start — instead of going “Ooh, ah,” that one person goes “Bunny, bunny,” pointing to themselves, and then “bunny, bunny,” pointing to someone else. And then that passes to the next person who goes “bunny, bunny” to themselves, “bunny, bunny” to someone else. Meanwhile, everyone else is going “ooh, ah, ooh, ah.”
It usually takes a little while for people to get the beat and the rhythm but it picks up and people get in a groove with it, and then you can add extra layers to it. Sometimes you might ask the people either side of the person going bunny bunny to make a movement with their hands and go “Tuka tuka, tuka tuka” in time with the ooh-ahs and the bunny bunny.
On the face of it a silly game, but it almost never fails to create a high level of engagement. Even those just watching find it highly engaging and fun. And when it’s over I sometimes ask — when people say mostly that it’s been fun and interesting — “Well, what is it that this game is giving you that makes it fun?” Because like so many of these improv activities, although on one level it appears to be a little bit absurd, I think it shows something rather deep about human beings that we sometimes forget. There’s something quite primal about it.
So much so that it’s a game that actually reverberates in the venues in which I’m doing training. For example, I was in Malawi a few years ago with Viv McWaters and we played Bunny Bunny with a group of disaster recovery workers. And then the next day I was sitting in my hotel room, and in the background two of the hotel staff were talking in their native tongue, which obviously I didn’t understand. I wasn’t paying any attention until somewhere in the middle of their conversation they went “Bunny bunny” and laughed. They’d obviously heard this game and it was somehow still being talked about afterwards, even by people who weren’t in the room.
And I think it’s a really important thing to remember: there is a part of us that is primal and really responds to very simple, deep connectedness where we’re with others in cadence. We’re not exchanging a huge amount of intellectual information. We’re just tuning into each other. Some people would talk about co-regulation as a really important thing.
And I think one of the reasons I’m quite passionate about Bunny Bunny — apart from just enjoying it, and I’m still enjoying it 10 years on — is that I think it highlights how easily our meetings don’t provide that kind of co-regulation or emotional connection. I think it’s worse than ever because we’re now bombarded with information and argument and data on a constant basis. Social media, as we all know, has a tendency to over-excite, over-stimulate us, get us over-inflamed and over-excited. And in that over-excitement, it’s actually quite difficult to feel a sense of connection and belonging.
What Bunny Bunny introduces to a group in a really dramatic and emotional way is it reminds us of a fundamental hunger for that type of connection. And anyone involved in working with people — in facilitation or leadership, or anyone who’s involved in running meetings — I think it’s a reminder not to get obsessed with the transfer of information. In fact, information can probably be transferred more efficiently outside of the meeting, where people can process it more at their own speed, than inside the meeting. And we need to remember to put a focus on: are we allowing people to make an actual human connection?
And I’ll just add, if this does interest you, Bunny Bunny is almost certainly one of the activities I’ll be offering as part of my two-day Facilitation as Performance workshop here in Cambridge in September. Details in the link.
Thumbnail photo by Steve Smith on Unsplash
