This is a fast fun activity to help people be more creative, by getting small groups to come up with as many alternative uses for a common object as possible. The crazier the better!

How to do it

This warmup activity is useful for helping people to get into a more creative mindset. For this activity, you’re going to need an object, like a Spam can, a stapler, a pen... anything you might find around the office. If you have a large number of people, you will need to break them up into groups of up to 5, with some sort of object per group.

Tell everyone that this warmup activity is a way to help them be more creative, for whatever the challenge ahead is that they have to tackle. Tell them to come up with as many ideas as they can for alternate uses for the object they’ve got, in 3 minutes. Each person should hold the object, state an idea, the pass the object on to the next person. Make sure they know that all ideas are good ideas, and crazy unworkable ideas are fine. Emphasise that they have to go for volume ”” not quality ”” of ideas!

Yell “Go!” and time them. After the 3 minutes, ask each group how many times they went around the group.

Variations

This is a high-energy warmup activity. Feel free to ask everyone to stand in a circle while they’re doing it. You can still do this in a remote meeting, so long as everyone can still see the object that they have to come up with alternate uses for. Posting a photo of it in a common chat channel is a good idea.

This activity is also very instructional for doing collaborative creativity well. After the 3 minutes, ask everyone for comments on what it was like. Here are some answers you might get, with something you can say to help everyone understand how to improve their chances of being creative:

• Some of our ideas were just additions or adaptations of earlier ideas - this is good! Building on each others’ ideas is good. No one of us is more creative than all of us.
• I was too busy trying to think up ideas for when it came around to my turn, to listen to anyone - It’s natural to want to be smart and right; we want to come up with the best idea. And sometimes this means that we stop listening to others. Try to keep listening to others; what they say may unlock an even better idea for you.
• It started easy, but then got really hard - This is perfectly normal. We have to get all the easy ideas out first... and then the real creative work starts! Be brave and push through that barrier.

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