Musicians and singers do it. Professional athletes do it. And chances are, you do it too when preparing for an artistic activity or sports exercise: You warm up. Warming up helps you perform better when the real action begins, ensuring your mind and body are ready to rise to the occasion.

The same goes for creativity. Just as athletes train their muscles, you can train your mind to become more creative through practice and a positive attitude. And like any good workout, warming up before diving into a creativity session can make a significant difference. So, let’s explore what creative warm-ups are, why they are so valuable, and share some practical examples of warm-ups to get you ideation-ready.

What are creative warm-up exercises?

Creative warm-up activities are playful exercises designed to get participants of a creativity training or innovation workshop in the right mindset for Ideation. These activities involve non-serious creative thinking that eases everyone into the creative process without the pressure of coming up with groundbreaking ideas right away.

Unlike creativity techniques used during Ideation, creative warm-ups aren’t focused on delivering concrete ideas for a realistic or even real-life creative challenge. Instead, they involve light, playful challenges that encourage participants to start thinking creatively and suspend critical judgment — getting everyone loosened up for what’s to come.

Why are creative warm-up exercises important?

Creative warm-up exercises are beneficial for a range of reasons:

• They improve idea fluency. Warming up helps you get your mental gears turning more smoothly, allowing ideas to flow more freely later during Ideation. This is key for meeting Ideation ground rule no. 2: "Go for quantity. Quantity breeds quality.” As the  two-times Nobel-prize-winning American chemist Linus Pauling noted in this context, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
• They encourage suspending judgment. Ground rule no. 1 of Ideation reads: “No killing of ideas! Defer judgment.” (That’s why in X-IDEA, we have an entire stage, Evaluation, reserved for judgment, while we do not critically judge in the two creative stages, Ideation and Development). Creative warm-ups help you let go of your inner critic or your inner voice of judgment, making you more willing to voice unconventional thoughts.
• They promote wild thinking. The third ground rule of Ideation states, “Shoot for crazy, silly, wild ideas.” Creative warm-ups invite playfulness, which helps you break down mental barriers and boosts your confidence in expressing bold ideas.
• They set a positive tone. Fun exercises foster a lighthearted atmosphere, encouraging laughter and a sense of belonging and community among creative workshop participants. Such playful collaboration is crucial for nurturing team creativity. As Albert Einstein once said, ”Creativity is intelligence having fun."
• They build creative confidence. Participating in simple, low-stakes creative activities reinforces the belief that “I am creative” and everyone can be creative. After all, as the American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou noted, ”You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."
• They build creative competence and a sense of trust in the process. Warm-ups help everyone trust in the magic of creativity—a reminder that, with a well-structured creative process method and the right tools, extraordinary ideas will come (alongside many ordinary ones).

However, there’s one downside: creative warm-ups take time, which is often in short supply during creativity workshops, be it for training purposes or as part of a real-life innovation project. Today’s busy schedules mean creativity facilitators must balance the need for creative warm-ups with the push to deliver tangible outputs and innovative results.

How can you do it?

Like in sports, there are many ways to creatively warm up for Ideation. Below, I share seven exercises you can use to stretch your "creative muscles" before diving into an Ideation session. While all these warm-up activities can be done solo, I recommend pairing up or working in teams to add a social element, boosting energy and fun ahead of an Ideation effort.

Creative Warm-up #1. Idea Friends vs. Idea Killers

Have the group brainstorm for three minutes to list as many positive statements or body language gestures as possible that celebrate a new idea (“Idea Friends”). Then, spend another three minutes listing all the many ways businesspeople typically shoot down ideas, whether through words or gestures (“idea Killers”). Count which list is longer. Also, probe which list was more fun to produce (surprisingly often, it’s the second one). Finally, remind participants that only "idea friends" are welcome and encouraged during Ideation, while ground rule no. 1 forbids any killing of ideas.

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Creative Warm-up #2. ABC Sentences

Here’s a warm-up I created and enjoy using. Alone, in pairs, or as a group, create sentences using words that follow the alphabetical sequence. Once you reach Z, complete the sentence by starting again at A. The challenge is to keep the words quickly yet sensibly flowing and, at the same time, the sentences grammatically correct and sensibly flowing. For instance:

“Amanda bakes creative donuts, fully grated. Henry imagines jolly, kind, loving mice nurturing open presentations. Quirky Robert spots tremendous unicorns victoriously. Wonderful, xtraordinary, youthful zebras act bravely. Cats drink effortlessly from glasses.” 

And so on. The person, pair, or group with the most complete sequences wins. To add a twist, start with the letter of your first name to avoid copying others.

Creative Warm-up #3. Word Chain

Begin with a starter word and create a word chain by following this scheme: "If I think of [word], I think of [new word]." Continue adding words for five minutes. The person or pair with the longest chain wins. This exercise not only warms up the mind but also provides a diverse set of words that can be used later during Ideation for word association. 

Creative Warm-up #4. Word Map / Word Lotus Blossom

Write a word related to your challenge (in my case here, "warm-up") in the center of a sheet of paper. Then, write eight related words that come to mind around it. Next, take each of those words and write eight additional words associated with them. 

If you create eight words for each word related to the start word, your word map constitutes a Lotus Blossom Matrix. To do that in the given amount of time (typically 10 minutes), you need to think fast, suspend judgment, and at times also note down “weird” words (such as the exercise “laughing” in my example below). In any case, this warm-up is a fun way to quickly build a large pool of associative stimuli related to your challenge or topic.

Creative Warm-up #5. Combinatory Concepts

On two pieces of paper, write down the name of an object or service that starts with the first letter of your first and last name. Combine these two to create a new product or service (e.g., "DJ-ing" and "radio" = "radio DJ"). Then, meet with other team members and combine your concepts with theirs to see what novel creations emerge. 

For example, say another person came to you with the words “windbreaker” and “kart.” Possible combinations here could be:

• A windbreaker go-kart for rainy weather, 
• A zombie apocalypse survival kart with radio, 
• “DJ Windbreaker” (who’s famous for playing songs related to rain (“It’s raining men,” “November Rain”) and wind (“Ride like the wind’)),
• A plastic-coated transistor radio for survival news during or after a hurricane or typhoon, or 
• A ‘DJ on Wheels’ service for music on parades.

Apart from playfully creating more or less sensible new product or service concepts, this warm-up exercise is valuable because it encourages ground rule no. 4 of ideation (“Combine and improve on ideas.”) and one of the three main principles of concept design (combination) in the subsequent second creative stage of X-IDEA, Development.

Creative Warm-up #6. Team Artists

Show and explain the basic shapes used to create visual sketches, such as dots, lines, circles, squares, rectangles, etc. Then, on a flip chart, draw one shape and pass the pen around, with each participant adding to the drawing. Afterward, each group presents their creation with a humorous pitch. Reward the teams with the most artistic sketch and the funniest pitch.
Debrief the exercise by highlighting that everyone can make simple sketches using combinations of the elementary shapes. In addition, encourage participants to consider adding a simple sketch to some of their ideas during the subsequent ideation session. As the saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Finally, mention that“passing the pen around the circle” resembles Round-Robin Brainstorming, a creative interaction style where participants suggest ideas by going around from one person to the next. 

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Creative Warm-up #7. Creative Planes

A simple but effective creative warm-up is to let participants build their favorite version of a paper plane. Have them decorate it, and then hold a contest to see whose plane flies the furthest. The winner shares the design secrets of their paper plane. 

This kinesthetic warm-up exercise reconnects participants with the exuberant joy of their playful childhood days and their creative younger selves. It reminds them that creativity often involves a sense of playfulness, experimentation, and iteration, which are fundamental principles of rapid prototyping that the participants might apply on their most promising concepts at a later stage of the X-IDEA creative process (Evaluation).

Conclusion: Create every day, warm up before you play

Creative warm-ups are a playful way to prepare for Ideation, but what if time is tight? At Thinkergy, we sometimes integrate a quick Word Chain or Word Map warm-up exercise into our X-IDEA workshops, then later use these outputs as a springboard to create ideas for a real challenge in the Ideation phase (by applying the I Tool Word Association Chain). 

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Similarly, we often ask delegates to build a paper plane as a creative warm-up activity before Ideation, then later use it as a medium for idea generation in the I Tool Idea Planes. So, be creative in your approach. For every project you facilitate, ask: How to creatively warm up, ideate, and produce meaningful outputs for the creative challenge in the given time? As Dr. Seuss noted: “Think left and think right, and think low and think high; Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try.”

Ready to unleash your creativity?

• Dive deeper into creativity tools and the many ways you can apply them in my new book, Unleashing Wow!
• Ready to explore X-IDEA? Check out the X-IDEA website and our X-IDEA booklet for more details and case studies on how to elevate your creative sessions.
• Get in touch: Contact us today to learn how our X-IDEA creativity training formats and X-IDEA innovation project workshops.
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Let’s get ready to create magic — one warm-up at a time!

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2024.