Effective Negotiations Icebreaker Annual Awards Ceremony

You are part of a small planning team tasked with organizing your unit’s annual awards ceremony—a high-visibility event that impacts morale, recognition, and leadership perception. Working in teams of 2–3, you will make a series of decisions to build your event. Each decision presents multiple options, all with clear tradeoffs related to cost, prestige, morale, and stakeholder expectations. There are no perfect answers—only choices with consequences. As your team progresses through each round, your earlier decisions will shape your available resources, constraints, and overall outcome. While this may feel like simple decision-making, you will quickly realize that: You have limited resources You have competing priorities You may have different opinions within your team To succeed, your team must discuss, persuade, compromise, and decide—just like in real-world negotiations. At the end of the exercise, we will examine: How your team made decisions What influenced your choices And how negotiation was happening the entire time—even if you didn’t call it that