From WNYC's RadioLab episode called "Contact":

The Conan O'Brien show has a person called the 'crowd unifier', whose role is to "unify" the crowd prior to show's start. The unifier starts about half an hour before the show, trying to get the crowd to think and behave as one, to have the same mood - purportedly so that their mood influences the mood of the TV viewers watching the show. Sometimes the unifier's job is easy - when the weather's lousy, for instance - but other times he has to resort to tactics like

• the state game: singling people from a particular state or country out to connect the crowd at their expense
• picking out the loudest: and shutting them up
• giving them stuff: handing out gift certificates if the crowd gets too feisty

This is in the context of a segment of the show on crowd control, but it strikes me as a potential process pattern: a short warm-up exercise just before a (participatory) design exercise to get everybody in good humour and, more importantly, to get them to agree about the purpose and nature of the activity. This kind of thing tends to get called "alignment" or "getting everybody on the same page" in corporate circles - but somehow 'crowd unifier' seems particularly appropriate to this situation.

Caveats: this particular pattern operates under certain assumptions

• the crowd is heterogeneous
• the crowd is a poorly connected social network
• the crowd members are unlikely to convene again

In short, the Conan O'Brien show has a crowd whose members do not have any investment in each other - so the unifier is free to pull and push the crowd apart using tactics like those above, and also to treat each instance as a new beginning. Probably not a wise thing to try at your next design team meeting.