Practitioner How-To Guide
The First Five
Arrival activities for the first five minutes of any session.
Purpose
The session starts, and the room has not.
The First Five exists to solve a problem you have watched happen: the session starts, and the room has not. These are arrival activities, each five minutes or shorter, that mark the transition from whatever people just left to whatever you are about to do together. They are not icebreakers in the get-to-know-you sense, not team-building modules, and not content. They are the doormat where the day outside gets wiped off.
Where it sits among your other tools: Question Roulette gives you conversation prompts for connection during a session. The Team Activity Finder gives you fuller activities that carry learning weight of their own. The First Five is smaller than both on purpose. If an activity starts wanting a debrief, it has outgrown this resource.
Choosing Well
Three questions pick your activity:
What context are you in?
Team Session Collection engagement: Use Anywhere activities only, no exceptions. The KNOW-primed activities use vocabulary that does not belong in TSC rooms, and the flag on the KNOW Contexts Only section is there to keep that line clean. KNOW Core or Exploration context: everything is open to you, and the KNOW-primed activities let the arrival moment do double duty by warming up the model’s moves before the content names them.
What is the room carrying?
Every activity carries one of four tags, and the tag answers this question. Distracted, mid-switch energy: reach for a Clear activity (One Word In, Leave It at the Door, Arriving Energy). Heavy day, visible fatigue: reach for Settle (The Quiet Minute, Three Breaths, One Question). A room that needs lightening: reach for Lighten (Weather Report, The Sixty-Second Sketch). A group ready to point forward: reach for Aim (What’s Different Today, Rose or Radar, Bring It In). The Quick Pick table on the resource page maps the same four rows.
How big is the group?
Round-robin activities (One Word In, Weather Report, Rose or Radar) scale to about ten before they eat the clock. Above that, run them in pairs or choose a silent activity. Silent activities scale to any size.
Running It Well
Keep the frame short. Ten seconds of setup, then go. Over-explaining an arrival activity defeats it.
Start exactly when you said. The First Five works partly because it marks a clean edge between before and now. A ragged start blurs the edge.
Do not debrief. The activity ends, the session begins. Resist the pull to harvest insights from a warm-up; that is what the session is for.
Participate yourself where the format allows. You arrived from somewhere too, and the room notices whether the activity applies to you.
One is enough. Stacking two arrival activities does not double the landing; it delays the start.
Virtual Delivery
Every activity in the set runs virtually with small substitutions: chat waterfall instead of round-robin for One Word In and Weather Report, cameras and a held-up sketch for The Sixty-Second Sketch, private notes instead of scrap paper for Leave It at the Door and Name the Residue. The Quiet Minute needs one extra sentence of framing on camera (“I am going to stay on screen; the silence is on purpose”) so nobody thinks the call froze.
The KNOW Line
⚠ The KNOW Contexts Only section is flagged, and the flag is not decorative.
Team Session Collection engagements run on their own vocabulary, and KNOW Core terms do not cross into them. If there is any chance the session you are opening sits inside a TSC engagement, choose from the Use Anywhere activities. When in doubt, Use Anywhere. Nothing in the KNOW-primed four does anything the Use Anywhere ten cannot do for arrival purposes; their only added value is priming language your group will meet again in Core and Exploration content.
Pick one, run it, start. The first five minutes belong to arrival; everything after belongs to the work.
