Like much of the nation, I’ve become slightly obsessed with The Traitors. It’s gripping TV – tense, dramatic, and often infuriating.

But beyond the entertainment, the Round Table, the central place where decision making takes place has started to feel uncomfortably familiar.

Because if you strip away the cloaks and candlelight, what you’re really watching is a bad meeting.

Or more specifically: a bad brainstorm.

The Round Table: genius TV, terrible thinking

From a format perspective, the Round Table is brilliant. From a thinking perspective, it’s a car crash.

What gets banished isn’t just players – it’s original ideas, nuance and critical thinking.

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting where:
– one confident voice set the direction
– silence was mistaken for agreement
– challenging the group felt risky
– decisions happened fast but didn’t feel right

…then you’ve already been at the Round Table.

Why brainstorms fail: the psychology of groupthink

What’s playing out in The Traitors is a textbook example of groupthink.

Groupthink happens when a group values agreement or harmony more than critical thinking. The result is that decisions are made quickly, confidently – and often badly.

Every ingredient for groupthink is baked into the Round Table, and into many workplace meetings too:

– high stakes
– time pressure
– incomplete information
– strong personalities
– social consequences for dissent

Sound familiar?

“The loudest idea wins”

At the Round Table, the first confident accusation often sets the tone.

Once a name is floated:
– people start looking for evidence to support it
– contradictory information is ignored
– silence is interpreted as guilt
– disagreement feels dangerous

The same thing happens in badly run brainstorms.

When the most senior or confident person speaks first:
– the group converges too early
– alternative ideas never surface
– quieter thinkers opt out
– confidence is mistaken for clarity

Creativity doesn’t die with a bang. It quietly exits through the fire door.

What’s missing from many brainstorms: managed divergence and convergence

Good creative thinking follows a natural rhythm:

Diverge → explore → converge

That means generating multiple possibilities, holding ideas lightly, resisting early judgement, and only then deciding.

The Round Table skips straight to judgement.

Rarely is anyone asking:
– what else could be true?
– what are three alternative explanations?
– if this theory is wrong, what might we be missing?

Instead, certainty arrives early and crowds everything else out.

Silence doesn’t mean agreement

One of the most damaging myths in meetings is that silence equals buy-in.

In reality, silence can mean:
– someone needs time to think
– someone doesn’t feel safe disagreeing
– someone has been drowned out before
– someone has learned it’s career-limiting to speak up

Earlier in my career, I was often the “go with the flow” person because it felt safer. I’ve also experienced how being the dissenting voice can be emotionally – and professionally – punishing in the wrong environment.

I see the same dynamic now when I’m facilitating. Reputational risk outweighs idea quality, hierarchy rules, and groups default to the safest option.

Three ways to stop your brainstorm becoming a Round Table

If you want better ideas, you don’t need louder voices. You need better conditions.

1. Separate thinking from speaking

Give people time to think or write before anyone talks. This prevents the first idea from hijacking the room and surfaces stronger thinking from quieter contributors.

2. Protect disagreement early

Make it explicit that alternative views are welcome before consensus forms. Once alignment hardens, challenging it feels socially expensive.

3. Delay judgement on purpose

If you move straight to decisions, you’re not brainstorming – you’re voting. Build in a deliberate divergence phase where multiple ideas or explanations are actively encouraged.

Why this matters for creativity at work

Creativity isn’t about wild ideas or blue-sky thinking. It’s about creating the conditions where better thinking can happen.

When meetings reward speed, certainty and confidence over curiosity, diversity of thought collapses. Innovation slows, even in smart and experienced teams.

The irony is that the most dangerous decisions often feel the most unanimous.

Banishing “who shouts loudest” brainstorms

The Traitors works because it exposes how persuasive certainty can be, even when it’s wrong.

At work, we don’t get the dramatic reveal. We just live with the consequences.

If nothing else, it’s worth agreeing to banish brainstorms where hierarchy dominates, assumptions go unchallenged, speed is valued over insight, and the loudest idea always wins.

Good thinking needs openness, friction and time.

Not a Round Table.

Want help building better creative thinking at work?

I’m Claire Bridges, Founder of Now Go Create. I help individuals, teams and organisations develop their creative capabilities through training, workshops and consulting – especially in environments where groupthink, hierarchy and fear get in the way of good ideas.

At the start of every year, the same thing happens.

Trend reports are published. Predictions are shared. “2026 and beyond” decks start circulating. And with them comes a familiar mix of excitement and pressure – we should do something with this.

But in practice, the use of trends often stays at the level of inspiration and never turns into action.

Why trend reports rarely give you ideas directly

Trend reports are not always immediate idea generators. Their real value lies in what they reveal about your potential audience’s:

• changing behaviours
• unmet expectations
• cultural tensions
• emerging needs

In other words, they give you raw material – not finished concepts.

Ideas only emerge once you interrogate that material and apply it to your context: your audience, your brand, your constraints, your ambitions.

This is why two organisations can read the same trend report and produce wildly different outcomes, which is a good thing in my opinion.

Why this trend, why now?

Using trends from platforms like TrendWatching, I encourage teams towards asking underlying questions about the trend:

• Why is this trend emerging now?
• What’s changing beneath the surface?
• What tensions or frustrations are becoming more visible?
• Who benefits from this shift – and who might feel excluded?
• Which deeper human needs does this point to?

This stage often feels less exciting than jumping straight to ideas, but it’s where clarity is built. Without it, brainstorming becomes guesswork.

Use a canvas to scaffold your thinking

One of the most useful tools I return to again and again is the TrendWatching Consumer Trend Canvas.

Not because it magically produces ideas, but because it forces you to:

• separate drivers of change from short-term triggers
• distinguish surface behaviours from deeper needs
• think about who the trend really applies

Choosing trend sources

Not all trend resources serve the same purpose, which is why I tend to mix and match.

Some of my go-to sources include:

• TrendWatching – for global consumer shifts and applied innovation examples
• PSFK – for future-facing thinking across retail, tech and experience
• Mintel – for depth, data and category-specific insight
• McKinsey & Company – for macro, tech and industry-level analysis
• Trend Hunter – for breadth and cultural scanning
• WGSN – for long-range lifestyle and consumer forecasting
• Exploding Topics – for spotting fast-rising topics early
• Think with Google – for behavioural insight grounded in search data

Each offers something different. None of them replace thinking.

Turning trends into action (without forcing it)

Trends are not instructions. They’re invitations.

Used well, they help you:

• see beyond your immediate category
• challenge assumptions that have gone unquestioned
• explore what might matter next and why

If you want help using trends to brainstorm creative ideas in your sector get in touch claire@nowgocreate.co.uk

For the past 30 years I’ve participated in or facilitated 1000’s of brainstorms. I’ve worked with leading creative agencies, brand marketers, academics and government departments on their problems exploring ways to generate solutions. 

Whether you like it or not, without exception this involved a meeting, a conversation and a group collaboration, or what’s more commonly called a brainstorm. Without guidelines, a brief and a facilitator it’s just a badly run meeting, what my fellow trainer Anahita Milligan describes at their worst as ‘the untrained, leading the unwilling, to do the unnecessary’. 

Susan Cain the author of Quiet, argues that brainstorming is tantamount to torture for introverts and is less productive than just asking people to work individually. But is this true?

In this conversation myself and my longtime collaborator Anahita, discuss the intricacies of brainstorming and facilitation, exploring its benefits and pitfalls. We share our good, bad and really bad personal experiences as facilitators, highlight the importance of trained facilitation and preparation, and the need for psychological safety and trust in creative environments. 

We also address some common myths surrounding brainstorming, such as the idea that there are no bad ideas, you need an hour in a stuffy room, with practical tools and techniques to enhance the brainstorming process.

Our chat also touches on the significance of engaging with real-life contexts and managing different personality types within creative sessions, ultimately aiming to redefine the brainstorming process for better outcomes.

I hope you enjoy the episode and feel better equipped to run a great brainstorm or workshop. I reflect after each session that I run, and I learn something new every time. It’s not something that you ever finish doing. It’s a blend of art and science and because people are involved and people are messy, it’s often a bit messy.

All the things we talk about the techniques shared are reflective of the content on any of our creativity courses, including our How To Be A Creative Ninja workshops. Please get in touch with Claire@nowgocreate.co.uk if you’d like a chat or more information.

Listen to the episode here

Osborne has also said that the phenomenon known as ‘groupthink’ is one of the reasons that the thefts went undetected for so long. He is suggesting that the whole group could not fathom or believe that the objects were vulnerable to theft, nor that anyone working at the museum would decide to steal them.

Whilst this is an extreme and shocking example of possible groupthink, it’s something that as a brainstorm facilitator I see often. People will defer to hierarchy or the so-called HIPPO in the room (highest paid person’s opinion).

“HiPPOs are leaders who are so self-assured that they need neither other’s ideas nor data to affirm the correctness of their instinctual beliefs. Relying on their experience and smarts, they are quick to shoot down contradictory positions and dismissive of underling’s input.”

Forbes Magazine

What is Groupthink?

It’s a phenomenon that occurs when a group of people make irrational or poor decisions because they are reluctant to challenge each other’s opinions or ideas. It is often caused by a strong desire for conformity and harmony within the group.

“Groupthink” was first introduced in Psychology Today by the psychologist Irving Janis. It can have a devastating impact on innovation. When people are afraid to speak up or disagree with others, they are less likely to share their most creative and innovative ideas. This can lead to a less diverse and less effective brainstorming session, and ultimately to poorer decision-making.

Here are some tips for avoiding groupthink:

• Create a safe and supportive environment: Encourage everyone to feel comfortable sharing their ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem.
• Set ground rules: Establish some ground rules for the brainstorming session, such as no criticism or judgment, and everyone gets a chance to speak. We like IDEO’s 7 rules for divergent thinking:
  • Defer judgement
  • Encourage wild ideas
  • Build on others’ ideas
  • Stay on topic
  • One conversation at a time
  • Be visual
  • Go for quantity.
• Use anonymous idea submission: If people are still hesitant to share their ideas, consider using an anonymous idea submission process. This can help to reduce the pressure of conformity and encourage people to share their most creative ideas.
• Have a facilitator: A facilitator can help to keep the brainstorming session on track and ensure that everyone has a chance to participate.
• Take breaks: Take short breaks throughout the brainstorming session to give people a chance to recharge and come up with new ideas.
• Break the group up: We like the process 1,2,4 all – work alone, in pairs, pair up with another pair then share back to the group.
• Use asynchronous tools: We love using MIRO and MURAL whiteboarding tools to allow people to share their ideas, anonymously or otherwise, in their own time without being unduly influenced by others.
• Share the criteria for decision-making: Make it clear that this is an objective process.
• Try a pre-mortem: When you’ve chosen a route, think about all the possible things that could go wrong using the pre-mortem technique (before the patient/idea dies a death, not after). See our blog on the pre-mortem here.

By following these tips, you can help to create a brainstorming environment that is more conducive to creativity and innovative thinking. When people are afraid to speak up or disagree with others, they are less likely to share their most creative ideas. This can lead to a less diverse and less effective brainstorming session, and ultimately to poorer decision-making.

Any of this sound familiar? When we run our creative thinking training we often hear from clients that their brainstorming or creative process is not working brilliantly. 

And recently I was a guest on the the Highly Relational podcast, with Robert Digings, a former attendee on one our courses. He asked me to talk about how to build a high performing creative team. 

I talked about one of my favourite and easily accessible models to think about how you can help your team to develop and generate better ideas in a brainstorm, or any other setting. 

You can’t expect a new team to perform exceptionally from the very outset. Team formation takes time, and usually follows some easily recognizable stages, as the team journeys from being a group of strangers to becoming a united team with a common goal. 

I’ve written about the topic of psychological safety before, and it’s a key part of high performing teams, and building collaborative teams who trust each other and feel confident to share their ideas. 

In order to nurture your creative team – actually, any team – so that it becomes a high-performing group, a whole load of magic (and science) needs to happen en route. 

If you facilitate creative sessions or workshops of any kind then it’s good to understand a bit about team dynamics and how to successfully navigate everyone through the different stages of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.

A quick run-through the Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing process

Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing are what psychologist Bruce Tuckman identified in the 60s as the ‘developmental sequence in small groups.’

Here’s each stage at a glance:

What’s the forming stage?

Remember those awkward first-time encounters between strangers in a new team group or in a group of people brought together for a meeting or a brainstorm? This is part of the forming stage where each person isn’t quite sure of where they fit in or what the other people in the team are really like.

They will all have different agendas, too. Some will be totally up for it, while others will be reluctant participants. Who will emerge as a team leader? Who will tap into a vat of extra strength when the going gets tough?

What’s the storming stage?

This is the phase that many teams never quite get out of – especially if they don’t meet regularly. It’s when everybody is jockeying for position, and people often struggle with each other’s boundaries or working style.

If left unchecked, this kind of team can derail the whole process or a brainstorm as participants question the value of the brief, the team leader and the mission as a whole. Getting through this phase is an essential part of the process. If you have to facilitate at either of the above stages it can be challenging, as essentially you’re thrown into the mix too! 

When do we know when we’re norming?

As the name suggests, this is where things normalise somewhat. People get into the rhythm of the group, they find their place, and a certain kind of harmony tends to develop.

With your team members more comfortable around each other, they become better at challenging problems, asking for help, receiving and giving feedback and so on. Trust is key and people feel confident and safe about sharing their ideas. It’s not about groupthink though; where the group feel the need to get to a consensus and harmony, it’s about feeling you can debate, discuss and challenge without feeling threated. 

Now we’re performing

Obviously, reaching this stage doesn’t happen overnight, but a functioning team that has been through the norming phase usually passes onto the Performing phase – with the right guidance.

Your goal isn’t necessarily to get the team from Forming to Performing in the shortest possible time; the trick is to get them to the Performing stage at all!

After all, we’ve all been in groups of co-workers who simply never gelled, and conflict remained a constant issue. I’ve been part of working groups where the thinking was siloed and people did not want to listen or debate ‘their way or the highway.’ 

How you can use the Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing method to accelerate your creative thinking

Now that you know the four stages, it shouldn’t be too hard to identify where your group or team is at.

If it is one of the first three, your move should be to try and shift them to the next stage. 

How do you do this? You can address:

Build trust: If you do one thing, do this. Set ground rules for engagement and make it clear through your own words and actions if you’re facilitating that everyone’s voice is equal. Make sure that team conflict does not go unresolved.

The dreaded ice-breaker – whatever works for you here as you’ll set the tone as the facilitator – help people to get to know each other better. Personal favourites:

• What’s your theme tune today?
• What did you want to do for a job when you were little?
• Tell a story one sentence at a time (everyone says one line)

Individual performance. One-to-one feedback with participants could help to nudge them in the right direction.

Your own leadership or facilitation style. Are you playing the role of a capable captain – or a foundering junior officer steering the ship onto the rocks? Do you actively listen and offer people different ways to participate? Are you finding ways to bring the introverts as well as the extraverts along with you?

So if you want to get to better ideas and improve your facilitation skills, consider the model and see where you can add something to build your skills. Let me know how you get on!

You can listen to my contribution to the Highly Relational podcast here.

And if you want help with your creative thinking at any stage of the process, we have a brainstorm facilitation course for that. Drop me a line for more info.

Photo by Gary Butterfield on Unsplash

There’s always lots of discussion about the good, the bad and the ugly of a group brainstorm when we work with organisations to up the ante on their creative output.

Most businesses can benefit from problem-solving training of some kind, and while brainstorming is not my go-to tool when helping them to improve their creative thinking, it’s a starting point that most people are familiar with.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we expect far too much from a single meeting (or ‘brainstorm’). I think we need to re-imagine the process or at least the outcomes.

Why badly-run meetings stifle creativity

I’m no fan of a badly-run meeting – which effectively a crappy brainstorm is. You’ll know if it’s badly run if there’s:

• No agenda
• No stimulus
• A poor problem statement
• No insights
• Zero prep
• No facilitation
• Loads of assumptions, judgements, distractions and silo-protecting.

And that’s to name but a few. If it’s badly-run, then 99 times out of 100 the creative output in a brainstorming session will be weak. You don’t need a PhD to see why: it’s like asking why a team of under-prepared, bored automotive designers with no actual brief came up with a lousy car.

Call the idea-generating process whatever you like, but in my experience, brilliant creative and innovative ideas are rarely (if ever) the result of one person’s work start to finish. So we need to actively listen, to facilitate, to build on nascent thoughts and make room for discussion, debate and dissent – amongst other things.

This ‘creative abrasion’ is what aids the best ideas.

It’s not about ‘there’s no such thing as a bad idea’. Of course there are loads of terrible ideas in meetings or brainstorms or conversations. It’s what we do with them that counts – and also how we react. If we were scriptwriters, we’d just call it all material until we decided what to do with it.

How to brainstorm? It takes a whole team

With Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity coming up next week, a glance at a single entry will often show up to 20 people named as contributors. Academics and scientists, meanwhile, will cite many others in their own work.

Maybe the idea came from one person, and is (hopefully) based on an insight or data from another person or team. Then the fledgeling idea goes through multiple iterations and edits before it sees the light of day.

This HBR article is not new, but it’s still relevant here. It shows how the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety — the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake.

Risky ideas need freedom to breathe

Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off. These are just the types of behaviour that lead to market breakthroughs.

Amy Edmonson of Harvard has written extensively about this and created an assessment – the Team Learning and Psychological Safety Survey is a 24-item measure. Team psychological safety, defined as the extent to which the team views the social climate as conducive to interpersonal risk, is assessed.

Also measured are:

• Internal team learning behaviours, including the extent to which team members engage in behaviours designed to monitor progress and performance against goals and behaviours designed to test assumptions and create new possibilities
• External team learning behaviours, defined as the extent to which team members engage in behaviours designed to obtain information and feedback from others in the organisation or from customers.

The respondent must also provide information on team learning outcomes, which are defined as the learning benefits for individual team members as a result of working on this team.

Watch her short TED talk here

So when brainstorming, start with building trust and the ideas will follow.

If you’re interested in developing your creative abilities and problem-solving skills check out our latest courses.

Creative icebreakers are just the thing for starting a problem solving or brainstorming session. We use them all them time during our creativity training courses, as they help people to get in the right mood and loosen up.

If you’re wondering about the image above this post, it’s because we originally started it with the line: How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice, boom boom.

Sorry about that 🙂

The fact is, there’s more to a good icebreaker than pointing to a random person and saying ‘Tell us a joke!’ (in fact, definitely don’t do this). A good creative icebreaker will cajole, include… and get everyone feeling a sense of kinship with their fellow idea-makers. Here are six of our favourites…

1 The ‘Wouldn’t It Be Amazing If…?’ Icebreaker

Ask everyone to paint a vision of the future for your project with this ambition-laden sentence. Complete the phrase….

‘Wouldn’t It Be Amazing If…?’

2 The Cube Icebreaker

One of the oldest thought experiments is The Cube. This game, popular in the coffeehouses of Eastern Europe, is reputed to be of ancient Sufi origin.

The game involves participants imagining a desert landscape with five specific elements. According to a current book about this game, your answer is a “soulprint” that provides a profile of your inner life. You can interpret the answer to discover unconscious truths about how you define yourself.

If you are intrigued, you can get detailed directions and interpretations from this book written by Annie Gottlieb – The Cube: Keep the Secret

3 The Movie Pitch Icebreaker

Split people into small groups or pairs and ask the group come up with a movie they want to make. Everyone should have a short elevator movie pitch prepared within 10 minutes. Let everyone make their pitch, and then have attendees vote on which idea deserves “funding”.

4 The Created-by-you-for-you Icebreaker

Have each meeting attendee bring or make up their favourite icebreaker. This “icebreaker” can be a funny joke, a quote, a phrase, an activity – anything at all. It works because it removes the “Why are you making me do this?” factor. Everything employees do will be self-inflicted.

5 The Visual Icebreaker

One of our favourite creative icebreakers is this quick exercise. Dubbed “The Doodle Dandy,” it was found on How Design and it works like this…

You get a stack of simple “starter” scribbles (just a few swirls and lines on bits of paper) and a stack of short phrases. And the goal is to draw a doodle (starting with the existing swirls and lines)  on the paper.

Here is their sample phrase list (they also encourage you to come up with your own, which could be tied by you into the theme for the meeting)

• “Happy as a clam”
• “I can’t get no satisfaction”
• “Where in the world?”
• “A hard day’s night”
• “Human nature”
• “The art of noise”
• “Here comes trouble”

6 The go-for quantity Icebreaker

This is IDEo’s 30 circles exercise mentioned in Tim Brown’s 2008 TEDTalk Tales of Creativity in Play  

My team and I have now run thousands of brainstorms, workshops and training sessions (that’s Now Go Create’s uber facilitator Anahita in the photo above, facilitating a session with Google). We’ve also spent many hours designing and re-designing our courses to create and deliver exciting, impactful, useful sessions.

Our most obvious role, is that of facilitator in the brainstorm or meeting on the day: we’re the ones who make sure the problem-solving session is well structured and runs smoothly. But what many people don’t realise is that the art of creative workshop facilitation requires a whole bunch of in-demand skills – good prep being one of them.

There’s more though. So we thought we’d share some of our brainstorm facilitation go-to tools, tips and tricks right here.

Start with the free brainstorm template, adapt it as you need to, and then use that alongside the tips here. Flex it to your own style and project needs.

The truth about creative workshop facilitation

As I’m sure you already know, there is no single right or wrong way to run a creative session. But we can help to provide some structure and ideas that you can pilfer.

By the way: do you know the definition of facilitation? It means ‘to make easy’. We also think of it like this:

• It’s a process that assists participants in meetings to work to their objectives and achieve their goals
• It focuses on the participants, not the facilitator.
• It’s a way to create a safe space for everyone to express their thoughts (see our blog on psychological safety).

What we’ve learned:

1. There is no one-size fits all. BUT the one thing that will never fail you is prep. What you do outside of the room matters as much as what happens in the room. And by room we mean real or virtual.
2. What is the problem? Write it down as simply as you can. Then write it 5 x differently – change the verb (from attract to lure to encourage to enable, for example). Ask everyone to write their ‘Twitter’ brief – say it in 280 characters or less. What’s life or death? Here’s some more about briefing.
3. Explain it to your gran – get rid of jargon.
4. Ensure you have stimuli – customer insights, imagery, the results of any research or product information and your chosen creativity tools.
5. Break the group into pairs or trios. You don’t have to involve the whole group all the time.
6. Allow time for generating ideas and separately for evaluating them.
7. If it all goes Pete Tong, take a 5 minute comfort break and regroup.
8. Make sure you have prepped and resourced yourself. Ask if you have you done everything you can to prepare yourself, mind, body and spirit so that you can be fully present and engaged. And can create a playful atmosphere and environment for creativity and collaboration.

Check out these resources and free templates:

1. Use trends as resources – have 5-10 relevant trends ready to use and use as triggers for your challenge.
2. Use the candor app – have a remote brainstorm with one of our favourite online tools.
3. Get to the root of the problem with the five Whys.
4. Do the opposite of what’s expected with this ‘reverse your thinking’ tool.
5. Scamper – this is one of our favourite ways to oil the creative wheels.

We have created a short, practical ‘How To Brainstorm and Facilitate Like A Pro’ module as part of our e-learning creativity course options that you can take at your own pace and work through your own challenges to get prepared. It costs £30 + VAT and can be used in even more depth alongside the template. You can get started today. Email me claire@nowgocreate.co.uk and I’ll get you enrolled!

Or join one of our open training workshops or book an in-house session for your team. Contact lucy@nowgocreate.co.uk

Ice-breakers and brainstorm warm-ups get a bad rep. But these 9 mood-setters will get you off to a great creative start…

A friend of mine (a self-confessed introvert) says that she has speedily got up and left the room before her turn when asked to do something in a group.

So I do get how speaking out loud at the start of a creative thinking session can be a real turn-off. But I think it’s important to do something to try to get people in the same headspace. And if you want people to be creative, you have to signal that this is not business as usual.

This applies when meeting on or offline. From my own regular facilitation experience, I find that sessions do go better when we mentally ‘warm up’ than when we don’t. And it really doesn’t have to be cringey or exposing!

A photograph to break the ice

One way I get people to warm up is to ask people to engage before the session: I allocate 10 – 15 minutes before and invite (not mandate) people to take a walk and photograph something from an unusual angle. We then share it – and find a fresh perspective.

Or it can be a good idea to just take the walk for a digital break. Almost everyone takes part.

During Zoom sessions, if participants feel the need to have a cup of tea and five minutes to themselves, camera-off, that’s all good too – if that’s what they need. So many calls seem to be back-to-back-to back these days. It’s not good for our wellbeing – in so many ways.

I’m always on the hunt for interesting ways to engage with brainstorm warm ups. Some of our favourites include:

1. Draw your mood
2. What’s your theme tune today?
3. What did you want to do when you were seven?
4. On a scale of X, how are you feeling today? (X being ‘cat’, ‘monkey’, ‘cake’ or whatever you like!)
5. Virtual scavenger hunt – set a task to find something that’s older than you, for example
6. Zoom background challenge 
7. Whose desk is this?
8. Choose a virtual cocktail – or better still, what’s in your fantasy cocktail?
9. What would your superpower be if you had one?

I love this creative session icebreaker that I shared today with a group. It was prep for tomorrow and I asked them to mimic a masterpiece and create a Hepworth in vegetable form. Or turn yourself into a Van Gogh. Or explore 5 different Natural History Museums from home.

The Hepworth challenge is great: it involves turning a humble potato into a piece of sculpture and is from a treasure trove of ideas and free stuff at Google Arts and Culture.

Do you have any tips for getting in a great state to create and your favourite brainstorm warm ups? Keep them to hand and share with your team so you have lots of options to hand when you need them.

Join one of our online training sessions if you want to learn more tips about how to get the most out of your brainstorm warm-ups and creative workshops. Or try downloading our free brainstorm prep cheat.