Games and exercises to energise meetings, build connections, and spark creativity in your workplace.
This is a great warm-up before a creative session. It can also be a way to highlight that collaboration can lead to unexpected and pretty awesome outcomes. No drawing skills required!
The group builds on top of each other’s squiggles to create a final picture. Works with any size of group, as long as you have enough time and colourful pens to go around.
This is an activity for when you want to improve the team’s ability to deal with uncertainty. It can make you more familiar with the fear of looking silly and help you lessen it (by exposure : ) Great activity for team bonding in an established team. It can also work as an icebreaker for a play-friendly group. As these kinds of activity can be intimidating for some, make sure participation is voluntary.
The group creates a scene with 3 people making up poses. Works for any group size over 6, but ideally around 8-12.
When you want the group to learn more about each other, get oxytocin flowing to increase trust and empathy.
You use a set of story cubes and let the images inspire your story-telling – they can be used in many different ways. This activity can work for any small to medium-sized group, and even in one-on-one coaching.
This activity, also called ‘Alternative Uses Test’, can get the creative juices flowing before you need to tackle innovation or problem-solving. Psychologist JP Guilford created this as a test, but it can be used as a simple activity to identify your natural limitations. It’s a great example for illustrating Functional Fixedness – the bias making it difficult for us to come up with novel or left-field ideas. It can also highlight how working as a group increases the number of potential solutions.
In this activity everyone will individually list as many alternative uses for an object as they can think of within a couple of minutes. It works with any sized group.
This is a great activity for team bonding and having a laugh together. The participants collaboratively make drawings of each other’s faces and the artwork can be used later on to decorate the team area.
Ideal for a group of between 5-8 people and split the group into multiple teams if larger than this.
This activity can be used as a warm-up for a session needing creativity, eg an ideation workshop. It was created as a test by psychologists, but rather than using it to judge an individual’s initial creative abilities, you can use it as a way to identify our natural creative weaknesses and highlight how working as a group increases the number of solutions.
In this activity everyone will individually draw as many solutions as they can think of within a minute, and it works with any sized group.
This activity helps teams to get into the mindset of identifying their assumptions and shows that they may not always be correct or even helpful. It can work as a warm-up before a problem-solving or creative session when you want to illustrate the concept of Functional Fixedness.
The group tries to put the puzzle pieces together. While this appears deceivingly simple, it is actually quite difficult as many common practices and ideas don’t apply to this particular puzzle. Ideally for groups of 4-16 people, but keep each team to 4 or less.
Creative and energetic activity that is helpful when introducing collaborative design, lean development, and customer-centred design. This is also useful for reinforcing concepts such as cross-functional teams, collaboration and incremental delivery.
The group is split into two (or more) teams and everyone is assigned a role to create a zoo model with play dough and craft material. The winner is the team with the most points for their zoo model at the end of the third iteration. You need a minimum of 9 people and this activity works well with larger groups.