The best dinner party icebreaker: "What does Google not know about you?"

We've used one icebreaker at 5,000 dinners. It turns a table of strangers into friends before dessert. Here's exactly how it works, so you can steal it.

Why "What do you do?" kills a dinner

The New York hello is "So, what do you do?" If the answer isn't impressive enough, people move on to the next person. That's networking. It's a resume swap, and everyone is performing.

At a dinner, that's death. You get twenty people reciting their LinkedIn headline, and nobody remembers anybody. I want to know who you really are. Not your title. The version of you that your best friend knows.

So twenty years ago, I started asking a different question.

How the icebreaker works

1. Warn everyone before they show up. Tell guests in the invite: you'll introduce yourself with something Google doesn't know about you. People who've had time to think bring better stories.
2. Explain the rules once everyone's seated. Name. What you do. Something Google doesn't know about you. That's it.
3. Set the tone. I tell the table: this will be as fun or as boring as you make it. If you want to make it spicy, go with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
4. Keep it to one or two minutes. The longer the intros, the less time you have to actually talk to each other.
5. Have a "wrap it up" signal. Mine is spinning my hand at my throat. Everyone knows it. When they see it, they stop.
6. Optional: give a prize for the best story. At one of our San Diego dinners, a special winner took home a special prize for making us laugh the hardest. That's a great gift exchange.

"What does Google not know about you?! That was our invitation into a memorable conversation."Nitya Wakhlu, Wonder Women member

Why it works

Everyone walks into a room of strangers with their walls up. This whole thing has been a big experiment on human behavior for me, and the question is always the same: how do I get those walls to come down?

Laughter does it. Funny is sticky. When someone tells a ridiculous story about herself, the whole table relaxes. And suddenly people find things in common that have nothing to do with work. You're a mom. You're an Olympian. You all did the same stupid thing in Vegas.

It also tells you who someone really is, fast. How someone tells that story says more about her than her resume does. By the end of the first hour, I know everyone at the table.

Members feel it too. After a dinner in Philadelphia, one guest wrote that she "learned that everyone in the room had a secret that could not be Googled." In Sydney, our host Noga Edelstein called it "a secret sauce to getting to know each other very quickly - a little naughty, highly effective."

Examples of "something people don't know about me"

Real ones members have shared publicly from our tables:

• She met her husband in a phone booth, and they've been married 39 years.
• She learned puppetry, and found out how much strength it takes to work a puppet.
• She sang her go-to karaoke song a cappella, right there at the table.
• Me: I did stand-up comedy at Caroline's in New York.
• Also me: I rap "Gangsta's Paradise" at karaoke. Have you ever seen a little Asian woman rap?

Stuck for your own? Think about:

• The most ridiculous job you ever had
• A skill nobody would guess you have
• The worst thing that happened to you on a trip, and how you got out of it
• How you met your partner, or your best friend
• The time you almost got arrested (or did)

Using it outside a dinner party

It works anywhere a group of adults needs to stop being strangers. A team offsite. A board retreat. A brunch. A new committee's first meeting. Keep the same three parts and the same time limit. At work, you can drop the sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Why bother? Because most of us are lonelier than we admit. About half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness, according to the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory. Small rooms where people actually get to know each other are part of the fix.

Questions hosts ask me

What's the best icebreaker for a dinner party?

Have each guest share their name, what they do, and something Google doesn't know about them, in one or two minutes. It works because it skips the resume and goes straight to a story.

How long should each introduction be?

One to two minutes. With twenty guests, that's already about half an hour. Any longer and people stop listening.

What if someone doesn't want to share?

She doesn't have to share her deepest secret. Small and funny is perfect. But the guests who open up are the ones who make friends at the table, and they're the ones who come back.

Does it work with a small group?

Yes. With six or eight people you can let stories run a little longer and ask follow-up questions.

Dr. Yao Huang founded Wonder Women more than twenty years ago with a table of four friends in New York. Today it's 20,000 women and 5,000 dinners in 30+ cities. She is also the founder of The Hatchery and a three-time TEDx speaker.