Creativity Workshop Activities

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.

Creativity is connecting things. If you are looking to give your creative mind a workout with a simple concept mash-up, look no further. The more you do this, the better you’ll get at one of the fundamental skills that lead to new ideas, combining elements. We've found a simple online tool from Dave Birss that helps you to define random objects that can form the basis of your creative combination.

The connection between walking and enhanced creativity has a long history. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1889) wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”. New research has backed up what many have thought for centuries with data, quantifying the effect of walking on human thought. Researchers at Stanford recently found that walking outside led to almost 3 times as many creative ideas as sitting indoors.

If you like playing Charades (Guess the word) in a live setting, there is no reason to hold you back playing it online with your team. Here is a handy Mural board and detailed instruction of how to play Charades with your team, using the words and expressions YOU come up with.

Even with established teams, it’s important to get people into the holiday mood and encourage creativity and collaboration.

Assign people into pairs or triads and each pair/triad needs to write one pair of rhyme for the music of a popular song. In this holiday-themed version, we'll ask participants to create a version of Jingle bells.

Whatever the occasion or song, it's a nice twist if they incorporate something in the lyrics that is related to your own company and culture.

We live in fast changing world and we need to think and react quickly and decisively. This gamification tool encourages people to think rapidly and creatively. Remove the mental barriers that prevent people from overthinking and blocking in branstormings.