Six Creative Warm-ups to Get your Team in the Right Mindset
Have you ever been in a brainstorming session that ended without any ideas being generated? Have you been in a meeting that ended without any actionable outcomes?
When you’re facilitating a meeting or workshop, it’s important to start out by getting your team in the right mindset. Team members are jumping from meeting to meeting, or task to task, so it’s important to transition people into the mindset that your work requires. Consider where people are coming from, and where you want them to go to. Creative warm-ups are a great way to get people into the right mindset, start from the right place, and set the team up for success.
When to run a creative warm-up
Much like athletes warm up before playing sports, teams need to warm-up for critical thinking. Start with an exercise that will help participants get comfortable with the work you will be doing in your meeting or workshop. For example, if you’re running a brainstorming session, start with a creative warm-up to help your team get comfortable with generating a lot of ideas.
Why run a creative warm-up
In addition to getting your team into the right mindset, creative warm-ups:
Create a shared experience and connection
Build trust and psychological safety between team members
Improve focus
Build your teams’ creative muscle
Get your team used to experimenting in a low-risk way
Help teams have fun!
Tools to run a creative warm-up
Most creative warm-ups don’t require many tools.
Tools:
Remote video conferencing tool if you’re running a remote session (Zoom, Microsoft Teams)
A facilitator to run the exercise
A timer
Virtual whiteboard tool, depending on the exercise (Mural, Miro, InVision Freehand)
Paper and writing utensil (this is great whether you’re in person or remote—it can be a much needed break from staring at a screen!)
Six Creative Warm-ups to try with your team
There are a lot of different creative warmups you can run with your team. Here are some of our favorites to get you started.
30 Circles
This is a great exercise to try if you’re going to be sketching or brainstorming solutions. It helps unlock creativity and get into the mindset of generating a lot of ideas.
Ask participants to draw 30 Circles sheet of paper.
Set a timer for two minutes, and ask everyone to turn as many of the blank circles as possible into recognizable objects (think balls, smiley faces, emojis, etc.)
Compare results. If you’re remote, ask everyone to turn their cameras on and show their drawings. Did anyone fill in all 30 circles? (Usually most people don’t fill them all in.) How many people filled in ten, fifteen, twenty circles? Did anyone draw outside the circles or combine them?
3-2-1 Blastoff
This exercise is great to get your team into the creative, playful mindset to imagine new possibilities.
Ask everyone to stand up, close their eyes, and imagine they’re standing in a big open field. Tell them they’re going to blast around the moon.
3-2-1-Blastoff!
Spend 15 seconds and imagine yourself blasting around the moon.
Now land back on earth.
Ask a few questions about their experience: Did they wear a spacesuit? Did they land on the moon? What were they thinking as they blasted around the moon? What did they see?
Really Bad Idea Brainstorm
This is a fun, low-risk exercise to get people to come up with a lot of crazy ideas. You can use sticky notes and a whiteboard, or use a virtual whiteboard tool if you’re working remote.
Start with a challenge. For example, you could start with “How Might We: Break people’s smart phone habits?”
Spend 2 minutes (without discussion) writing all the ideas you can think of—one bad idea per sticky note. Get your group started by being the first to throw out a really bad idea. For example, “Build a feature that electrocutes people after they've been using their phone for too long.”
If you’re going to be running note and vote exercises in your session, you could ask everyone to vote on their top 3 ideas to help prioritize and get people used to silent voting (either by using stickers for dot voting in person, use the voting feature in your virtual whiteboard tool, or draw circles that participants can use as dot votes in your virtual whiteboard.)
Reflect as a team. Were any ideas really crazy or surprising?
Nine Dot Puzzle
We like to use this exercise to get people in the critical thinking mindset and to encourage people to think outside the box.
Ask everyone to come to the session with a writing utensil and paper.
Ask participants to draw 9 dots in a 3x3 grid on a sheet of paper.
Set a timer for 2 minutes, and ask everyone to connect all nine dots, without lifting their pencil from the paper, using 4 or less straight lines.
Did anyone connect all the dots with 4 or less lines? Ask everyone to show their solutions.
Share a couple examples of how to solve the puzzle.
To-do list
This is a good exercise to get people to transition from where they just came from. It helps put aside distractions, release tension, and encourage people to be present.
Give everyone two minutes to write a to-do list that might be distracting them during the meeting.
Ask everyone to crumple up their list, and toss it behind them. This helps get the distractions out of people’s heads, and allows them to focus on the task at hand.
One thing, Nine Ways
Use this exercise to spark creativity and look at things from different perspectives.
Grab an object from your desk or home. It could be a pencil, a cup, paper, anything!
Ask everyone to grab a piece of paper, and divide it into nine squares by folding it into thirds—first horizontally, then vertically.
Ask everyone to draw nine new, unconventional uses for the object.
Give participants a short time limit (5-10 minutes) to complete it.
Ask everyone to share their ideas. Did anyone come up with a really crazy or innovative idea?
Try it!
The whole idea is to get people in the right mindset to collaborate, engage, and solve problems. Have fun and experiment—come up with your own exercises! Your team will be surprised by the impact of getting into the right mindset before focusing on critical work.
Team isn’t generating enough new ideas during the meeting? We can help!
We help plan and facilitate workshops and meeting structured to help your team generate more creative ideas and narrow down to the best ones.