Creativity Workshop Activities

Set participants up to create their own mini-deck of cards and bring home insights, key concepts and metaphors to remind them of the workshop.

This creative method invites participants to bring a possible future to life by designing or imagining a tangible object from that world. In the same way that we have historical artefacts from the past, this exercise is all about creating a tangible “artefact from the future.” It’s a way to make abstract scenarios feel real, prompting empathy, engagement, and grounded conversation.

Artefacts from the future can be run in a 2D or 3D approach.

When adopting the 3D approach, this method shifts participants into a making mindset. This engages their analytical thinking as well as intuition, improvisation, and embodied creativity. This helps surface insights that might not emerge through discussion or writing alone.

One idea enters the circle. The group builds it together, one sentence at a time. Every statement begins with "Yes, and..."

Canvas for Us (A Silent Reflective Gallery Walk)

Creating a sentence relating to a specific topic or problem with each person contributing one word at a time.

Paper Telephone is a mix of two methods, "Telephone" and "Pictionary". It is a creative game aiming to fasten the get-to-know each other phase of the team while having a good time.

In pairs, participant A attempts to communicate the use and value of a modern-day object to participant B, who plays the role of someone from 500 years ago.

Want to experience a fun, ever-change game? Bring a round of Calvinball to your next meeting - with a football, deckchairs, rackets, boomerangs, a deck of cards, a hula hoop, pens and paper (anything!) . . . and anyone can change the rules at any time.

The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It’s useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it. All successful ventures start with a vision and some small, initial effort toward crystallization. Alexander Graham Bell’s vision for the telephone started as highly rudimentary sketches.

One of the best ways to explore creativity is through building. Simple low fidelity prototypes can allow us to transform simple (and at times complex) ideas into something physical. In doing so we inevitably open a space for continuing to explore, reevaluate and iterate.

If curiosity and empathy can be a driver of creativity, there is no reason why they need be restricted to the observation of others. A range of technologies increasingly allow us to track, monitor and in doing so discover things about our own behaviours. Much of creativity is centred on making visible the invisible and for this reason spending time experimenting tools which allow us to do this may help us reflect on the potential for digital tools to be part of our creative toolbox.

Any creative endeavour can generate a certain amount of anxiety. The first step is always the hardest… has anyone not heard that before?

In his book ‘Being Creative’, Michael Avatar suggests that we draw inspiration from the Zen Buddhist idea of the 'beginner's mind' - where everything is beginning. In a beginner's mind there is possibility, openness, curiosity: all qualities that are useful for an exploration of creativity. This activity is a short, grounding ideation and exploration that taps into the beginner's mind.