What's With the Rubber Chicken?

Yes, there's a rubber chicken

At some point in almost every workshop, someone points at the rubber chicken and asks the question. Sometimes it's a fifteen-year-old. Sometimes it's a principal or a coalition director. The words are almost always the same: "Okay... what's with the rubber chicken?"

Fair question. The Rubber Chicken has been Indiana Teen Institute's unofficial mascot since the early '90s. I brought one with me to one of the first team-building sessions I facilitated. It's been part of ITI longer than most of our current participants have been alive.

My answer usually starts with what happens the moment one shows up. Somebody laughs. Then a few more people laugh. Not polite laughter but the real kind. The kind that sneaks out before anyone has decided whether laughing is allowed.

And then I have to admit something: I can't fully explain why. I've thought about it more than I probably should. I don't know what it is about a floppy, slightly ridiculous rubber bird that gets people most every single time. But it does. So we use them. When I want to sound a little more credible than "it's funny, trust me," I borrow from Karl Rohnke. If you've spent any time in adventure-based or experiential education, you've probably played one of his games, even if you never knew his name. He was one of the founders of Project Adventure, and he wrote a whole shelf of activity books, a few of them with "Funn" right in the title.

That extra N was on purpose. FUNN stands for Functional Understanding Not Necessary. In other words, not everything has to mean something. Sometimes the point is the laughter. Sometimes the whole debrief is a room full of people grinning, and nobody needs a flip chart to explain it.

Rohnke also described a "Fab Four Combo" for successful programs: communication, cooperation, trust, and FUNN. His point was that you try to build the first three while having fun at the same time, because people who don't enjoy what they're doing won't come back willingly for more. Then he went one step further. Of the four, he said, "FUNN is initially the most important."

To me, that was not a throwaway line from a guy who liked games. That was a lesson from someone who spent a career watching what made people show up again.

For a long time, my rubber chicken answer stopped at Rohnke. Then I read Catherine Price's The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, and I found the words for what I'd been watching happen in training rooms for years.

Price defines what she calls True Fun as the overlap of three things: playfulness, connection, and flow. Playfulness is that light, curious, let's-try-it attitude. Connection is the feeling that you're in this with other people. Flow is being so absorbed in what you're doing that you lose track of time. When all three show up together, you get the kind of fun people remember and talk about for days.

She contrasts it with what she calls Fake Fun: the scrolling, the bingeing, the stuff that fills time but leaves us feeling emptier than before. And she noticed something I think every facilitator should hear. When people described their best experiences of fun, almost all of them involved other people, even the self-described introverts like me.

That last part matters. If True Fun is mostly social, then fun isn't a break from the group work, it is group work. It's also why the True Fun diagram has a permanent spot in our FUNdamentals of Facilitation workshop (accompanied by pictures of a three-year-old at her first soccer match, but that's for a related topic).

Price also talks about building "playgrounds," meaning structures (real or metaphorical) that make fun more likely to happen. I'd argue a well-designed workshop is one of those playgrounds. And sometimes the cheapest piece of equipment on that playground is a rubber chicken.

Bernie DeKoven spent most of his life thinking about fun. He called himself a fun theorist, wrote The Well-Played Game back in 1978, helped shape the New Games movement, and kept a website called Deep Fun going for years. He also went by "Major Fun," which tells you a lot about him, something I saw firsthand as a participant in one of his last workshops.

DeKoven's big idea is that a well-played game isn't about who wins. It's about how well people play together. When a game is going well, the players are fully engaged and completely present, but they never forget that they're only playing. That mix of all-in and "hey, it's just a game" is where the authentic fun lives.

He also talked about the play community: a shared understanding among the players that keeping the fun going matters more than the rules as written. A healthy play community gives people permission to change the game, call a time out, or switch to something else when the game stops working for the group.

If you've ever watched a facilitator quietly adjust an activity midstream because a couple of people were getting left out, you've seen DeKoven's idea in action. The game serves the group, not the other way around.

That's deep fun. It's the kind of fun that builds trust, because everyone in the room gets to belong to it.

This is where I usually slow down, because a lot of people hear "fun" and assume I mean "silly." They aren't the same thing.

Fun can be silly. Silly can be fun. But they aren't synonyms, and treating them like they are is when things can go wrong.

Too many of us have experienced this one: A facilitator opens the day with a high-energy, everybody-up, sing-the-song, do-the-motions icebreaker (I'm looking at you "Singing in the Rain"). A few people love it. Most of the room smiles politely and goes along. And a handful of people quietly decide this is not a safe place to be. The ice breaker just became an ice maker.

In our FUNdamentals workshop, we put it this way: well-chosen, well-sequenced ice breakers can create the conditions for connection, and poorly chosen ones can make ice. So before I pick an activity, I ask a few questions. What level of risk fits this group right now? What do these participants actually need? How does this connect to the goal of the session? And my personal favorite: what's the cringe potential?

The trick is inviting people to play without putting them on the spot to perform, and that usually comes down to readiness and choice. Push people past their stretch zone and into their panic zone, and no amount of silliness will save the moment. Give them a real choice about how to take part, and the same activity can suddenly feel playful instead of risky.

Which brings me back to the chicken. Nobody has to do anything with it. It just shows up, asks nothing of anyone, and people laugh anyway. Maybe that's part of the magic: it's low-risk silliness that opens the door to real fun.

Without question, the work we do at ITI and Indiana SADD matters, and a lot of it is serious. We talk with young people and the adults who support them about substance use, impaired driving, mental health, and the very real pressures teenagers carry around every day.

None of that is funny. That's exactly why fun matters.

Fun is what gets people in the door the first time, and it's what brings them back. It's how a room full of strangers becomes a group willing to have a hard conversation. Playfulness lowers the stakes enough for people to try something new, connection gives them people to try it with, and flow keeps them there long enough to learn something. Rohnke had it right: if people don't enjoy the experience, they won't come back willingly. And we can't do this work with people who aren't in the room.

So fun is never the whole point, but it's always a factor. It's part of how we design a session, not something we tack on at the end if there's time left over.

The next time someone asks me what's with the rubber chicken, I'll probably still tell them I'm not sure why it's funny. That's the honest answer.

But I do know what it does. It gets a laugh. And it reminds everyone in the room, me included, that we can take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.

That's not a bad thing for a mascot to represent.