Never Skip the Icebreaker: Our top 3 warm-up exercises depending on your meeting

When you walk into a new meeting, there will always be a bit of time required for context switching. Brain scientists have told us that it takes a person 10-15 minutes to switch gears from one thing to another. Using those transition minutes to intentionally shift gears into the right mental mode for the work ahead is an effective way to make the most of the time you have booked.

The trick is to plan an appropriate activity for the group who’ll be participating to help get them where they need to be for the workshop (“two truths and a lie” is probably not it). Here are my top 3 warm-up exercises depending on what kind of meeting you’re running:

1)      Virtual meeting with a mixed group: Counting Up

How it works: Explain that no one will be put on the spot to share their deepest thoughts and feelings (big sigh of relief!). Instead, we’re going to try to collaboratively count to whatever number of people we have in the meeting. Everyone goes on mute, the host starts with ‘1’, and from there each person unmutes to say a number. But if two people say a number at the same time, we go back to 1 and start again.

Why it works: This is especially helpful when the group might not have a lot of trust or sense of security in the meeting (yet). Everyone gets a chance to contribute without having to be vulnerable. People have to tune into what others in the meeting are doing. From a practical perspective, it gets everyone familiar with the mute/unmute function and confirms that everyone’s mic works.

2)      Virtual or in-person focused on understanding customers or stakeholders: Share the most regrettable/embarrassing thing you nagged your parents for as a kid

How it works: As it says on the tin, the idea here is to think back to your childhood and try to remember the thing you were obsessed with and drove your parents (or caring adults) to distraction with asking for. As each person tells their memory, they get to pick the next person to speak, and so on.

Why it works: We’re often more accepting of kids exercising normal human irrationality than we are adults. If we’re building up to an insight session talking about what we think we know about our customers or stakeholders, or what we want to learn from them, tapping into that remembered experience and what it must have looked like for the adults we were nagging helps us get ready to look at things from other people’s perspectives.

This is also a good one to build trust and community among people of diverse backgrounds who may not easily find common touchpoints – we were all children once.

3)      Bigger virtual groups who will be brainstorming or working on a creative goal: Draw me a sunset

How it works: For this task, everyone should have at least 1 piece of paper (ideally 2), and a pencil. First off, the host gives people about a minute to draw a sunset. Then they ask the group to hold up their picture to the camera to look at everyone else’s and runs through the common attributes. Who put in clouds? Who put in birds? Who put in a tropical or beachy scene? Who put in buildings? There will be a couple of common elements repeated again and again.

Then the host gets the team to start fresh and think of a sunset they personally saw in the last couple of weeks and take about a minute to draw that specific sunset.

Repeat the exercise of everyone sharing their work – see how different everyone’s drawing is?

Why it works: Drawing is a great way to help the brain shift gears out of analytical mode into active, creative mode. With a simple little sketch like this, there’s a very low risk of people feeling nervous or embarrassed about their work. This drawing exercise brings to life the fact that if we take a generic approach to the work in front of us, we are going to get an undifferentiated outcome that could have been done by any other group of adults. Reinforcing to the group that they were all included because of their specific experiences and perspectives helps establish the confidence that’s necessary to contribute creatively.