5 ways to warm up your brain
When we do workshops or co-creative sessions, we basically become meeting-room athletes that want to perform at their best. And just like athletes warm up their muscles, we can warm up our brains to ensure better or optimal performance. Of course a good night sleep, drinking lots of water and setting the room temperature to 25° C will get you a long way, but in order to get really ready, consider using one or more of my favorite brain kick starters.
Warm-up exercises for strategy
These exercises are particularly useful for sessions that need users to think of the bigger picture, future possibilities and their brand or product in general. Usually these exercises are used in the first batch of sessions you do with a client and they allow you to think wider than just the product offering.
The Cover Story
The premise of the cover story is that you ask your participants to think of the future, where the project is finished and has become an incredible success. Because of this, a magazine of their choice (the most important magazine for their industry) gives them a cover story and huge interview to highlight the immense success of this project. Now your participants should draw the cover (including a title), write down the big headlines of the interview, add the most important quotes that testify to the success of the project, some accompanying images and last but not least, sidebars with statistics, numbers and quick facts (often KPI’s).
This exercise is based on The Grove Consultants International’s Leaders Guide to Accompany the Cover Story Vision Graphic Guide®
I usually give participants 7 minutes to create their cover story (I know the gamestorming guide says differently) because that gives the optimal result from my experience and also allows you to use it as a warm-up exercise. After that every participant gets 1 minute to quickly present it to the group. During these presentations, I try to capture the general idea’s and shared ambitions that are revealed and that’s also why I think this is a great exercise: it does not only get your participants in a brainstorming mindset (never met a group that didn’t love this exercise) but it also gives you an early sneak-peek into their (hidden) desires and ambitions.
Animalize
The idea of the animalize exercise is to let your participants think of your project as an animal or combination of several animals and let them draw that animal and annotate the traits that are relevant to the project. For example: This blog for instance could be a dolph-dog: a dolphin is a smart and intelligent creature, yet playful en fun to watch and a dog is a loyal companion. It’s a fun and quick exercise and it gives a basis for alignment on how your project will behave, act and talk.
Warm-up exercises for sketching and ideation
You can use the following exercises right before you need people to start sketching or ideating. The most heard complaint at the start of these sessions is “I CAN’T DRAW”, which is utter and complete nonsense. As long as you can draw basic shapes, you can illustrate any idea. The following exercises are particularly useful to take away this initial hesitation.
I’m An Alien, What’s An Apple?
I’ve got this idea from Dan Roam’s book, Back Of The Napkin. Usually there is not enough time to explain Dan’s SQUID model to people, but this exercise on it’s own seems to be an eye-opener for most participants and at least takes a piece of their hesitation away. Whenever people need to start sketching and I get the above complaint, I throw in this exercise: As my participants already may have guessed from my strange behavior, it turns out I’m an alien. Being an alien, everything on this planet is new to me. I heard about this thing called an apple, but I have no idea whatsoever of what an apple is. Kindly explain the concept of an apple to me in 20 seconds.
Illustration from “Back Of The Napkin” by Dan Roam
In the first round most people draw an apple, or an apple tree an you will also always find at least one iphone or macbook. I tell the group that I know understand the form of the apple and where I can find it, but can they tell me even more? Can I eat it? Is it tasty? Has it other functionalities? The group gets again 20 seconds to come up with a concept sketch and then usually you see the pennies drop. You will get fruit salads, vitamins, apple juice, the process from seed to tree to fruit, etc… And almost everyone will find some way that makes them comfortable to explain their idea in a single box by sketching instead of writing, though annotating is always permitted of course.
Squiggle Birds
Squiggle birds is an exercise I picked up at gamestorming.com and it is an ideal warm-up exercise to get your creative juices flowing. The idea is that you activate and use the pattern recognition capabilities of your brain by drawing random squiggles and than add beaks, an eye, feet and a tail to create birds from these random squiggles.
Squiggle birds example
By doing this exercise for 5 minutes, you not only warm-up your brain, but participants also realize that not that much of drawing skill is needed to convey and idea or concept. Click here for a full video explanation on gamestorming.com
Warm-up exercise to energize your participants
The last exercise we learned from Adam Lawrence during his masterclass “creating a safe space for innovation” at the Service Design Days Conference in Barcelona and will make you more focused and more energized.
3-brain
The idea of the 3-brain exercise is to push your brain to the limits. There are 3 major brain parts: left, right and the reptile brain. The left part handles all the logic stuff, like maths etc, while the right part handles all of the emotional and creative jobs. The reptile brain handles all the reactions and other “automated” jobs. The idea is that 3 people gather around the active participant and position themselves just behind his left and right ear and straight in front of the participant. The funny part is that your wires get crossed, meaning that your left eye and ear are connected to your right brain and your right eye and ear are connected to your left brain.
Left Brain: Rational — Right Brain: Emotional
So the person on the left is talking to the right part of the brain and has to ask the participant continuously to answer questions about colors, like “what is the color of the sea, what is the color of your front door, what is the color of your car?” The person on the right is talking to the left part of the brain and has to ask the participant to solve simple math problems (under 10) like “1+1, 4–5, 6–2, etc”. The person in front has to make very (and I mean very very) slow gestures with both hands the participant has to mimic.
The thing is, that these 3 brain parts can not work simultaneously, so the participant will really struggle answering all questions at the same time and mimic the gestures in front of him because his brain has to essentially timeshare. Now if the 3 persons involved really push the participant (and I mean really push, borderline torturing in terms of speed and wanting to get an answer) a lot of interesting physiological things will happen, resulting in two things: a warm back (try it, put your hand between the participants shoulder blades before and after) and a lot of chemical reactions that will make the participant more focused and more energized (resembling drinking a red bull perhaps). To test if this exercise was effective, you can put your hand between the shoulder blades of the person who just did the exercise, it should feel hot!
So try them and let us know if they warmed up your or your participants’ brains!
