Are you warming up your brain?
We know it’s important to warm up and stretch our muscles before we exercise. We can also use warm-up activities to wake up our brains before we work, activating the circuitry best suited to the tasks at hand.
Facilitators are intentional about using warm-up exercises to get the highest and best performance from a group. These are more than icebreakers. They help participants to transition and be present and engage while you wait for everyone to join. More importantly, they activate the brain.
For example, for a budgeting or scheduling meeting, display a simple math puzzle or sudoku for participants to work on while everyone joins the meeting. Seeing numbers wakes up brain circuits used for math and estimating. Starting with something simple helps put people at ease.
Warm-up exercises work for in person and remote participants.
Other examples:
Introductions - inviting each person to introduce themselves ensures that everyone has a moment of speaking to the whole group. This sets the tone that everyone is welcome to speak up and expected to contribute.
Storytelling – tell a rich narrative about what happened to you that morning, including descriptions that use all 5 senses. This activates the whole brain as listeners have their own senses awakened and construct their own images from hearing your story. This can also be done as a paired sharing for 2 minutes at the beginning of the meeting. If you’re prepping for risk analysis, invite pairs to share stories about project disasters. It seems negative, but you are priming their brains for to think about things that can go wrong.
Puzzles – trial-and-error puzzles like mazes are perfect prep for meetings where you will be planning iterations or designing experiments. Word finds and hidden pictures are great for meetings where you will need to break things down, sequence, and find patterns. Puzzles often require us to zoom in and out, alternating between the big picture and the details, which is a great warm-up for planning and organizing.
Choosing – start a decision-making meeting by having participants order lunch, choose a different virtual background, or pair up to play a silly game like Tic-Tac-Toe or “Would you rather be an ant or an elephant?” Making low-risk choices prepares the brain for analyzing decisions by activating the circuits and techniques used to choose amongst alternatives.
Physicality – warm-ups that use motor skills are even better, activating more of the brain. Can you roll dice or manipulate objects? Mirror each other’s movements? Play Rock-Paper-Scissors? Draw? Guessing the number of gumballs in a real jar of gumballs will wake up more areas of the brain than looking at a photo of a jar of gumballs. Attempting a Group Juggle or House of Cards gets you iterating ways to improve as a team. If you’re working alone and feel stuck on a problem, get up and take a walk. This can shift the problem from foreground to background processing and open up more pathways in your brain.
What happens when we don’t warm up?
People come into your meetings with a lot on their minds. They may be worrying about making mistakes after coming out of an incident review meeting. They may be focused on cost savings after a budget review. This risk-averse mindset inhibits creativity.
Neuroscience research by Dr. Baba Shiv, behavioral economist at Stanford GSB, describes this as our risk averse “Protect” mindset versus our open-to-new-possibilities “Prospect” mindset. “The brain can only move from the risk averse Protect mindset to the exploring Prospect mindset when it reaches a stable level of comfort.” If participants are still running risk-averse circuits from their previous meeting and they come directly to your meeting, they may be stuck in Protect mindset. They will have a hard time taking in new information and discovering new possibilities. They are likely to judge and discard ideas quickly, their own and others, helpfully pointing out why they won’t work and shutting down group input.
In the fantastic book, Ideaflow, authors Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn recommend using warm-ups to prepare a group for brainstorming or to discover new opportunities and pain points that might otherwise be missed. “The brain, intent on it’s objectives, tends to work around problems, compensating for them without even letting them register consciously…this habitual filtering of life’s annoyances means that juicy problems are hard to see.” The right prompts and warm-up activities activate our curiosity and help us see newly to reveal opportunities.
Worried about being perceived as wasting time?
Tell your group what you’re doing and why. Let everyone know you are intentionally using the first 5 – 10 minutes of the meeting time to warm up because it will make the rest of the meeting time more effective. Make sure your warm-up activity fits the purpose of the meeting. It doesn’t take a lot of time to activate different parts of the brain if you give it something new to do. You might be surprised that people learn to show up on time. And of course, the bonus is powerful teambuilding!