Marte Siebenhar facilitating a warm-up at a team retreat - photo by Ekaterina Juskowski
Are the meetings in your life boring, lifeless, unproductive, or just something you / others dread?
Do you dive right in, shoot the breeze, or sit uncomfortably waiting for the boss to appear?
Is there a sense of mundane-ness, sameness, or staleness?
If you said yes to any of the above, it’s time for a meeting makeover.
Because every meeting has the capacity for magic, and if you’re not accomplishing that, you’re doing it wrong.
Let’s step back and examine the meeting concept, and how to set the conditions for meeting magic.
The back story
The word meeting came from Old and Middle English, meaning, "to find, encounter, or join by uniting with." Centuries later, it had already accumulated other layers (perhaps this feels familiar?): "to come into collision with, combat, meet one's destiny, or come into conformity with, be or act in agreement with" (as in meet expectations).”
To create magical meetings, it’s best to reconnect with 450 A.D./C.E., or at least invoke and embody that era’s spirit of the word. Set out to find, encounter, or join by uniting with.
This means starting without preconceptions, and embracing that by coming together, there is something to be discovered. Not that everything is already known, or that very few are the only ones who know.
It implies that the impending exchange is a space of possibility.
If you’re rolling your eyes, stick with me.
Start from possibility
Hands down, the most effective way to start a meeting is by creating an energy of possibility.
To set the conditions for impending discovery.
Meeting magic begins with going into the unknown, where the playing field is level, and no one knows where things are going to go. No one is in control. No one is an expert.
The unknown is a place of shared discomfort.
Therefore, it’s also where empathy and emotional connection can take root. Least of all, the unknown is a place of equal opportunity because no one has yet mastered it.
That means the unknown is also a place of latent leadership, courage, and surprise. It’s a place where positions and entrenchment can’t exist—because there are no trenches in new territory.
Your new secret weapon
Facilitating is at the top of my why-I-adore-being-a-consultant list, which is why I never start a meeting without a warm-up.
Warm-ups are specifically and singularly designed to establish your discomfort.
For very good reason.
And yes, it’s for all these reasons that everyone hates warm-ups.
But it’s what happens after the discomfort that makes it worthwhile. That’s where the magic is, and it’s where a good facilitator, steering you through the initial discomfort and into possibility, makes all the difference.
The beauty is in the process: you don’t stay in the discomfort, you move through it and come out changed, on the other side.
Why warm-ups work
Warm-ups are a facilitator’s secret weapon for creating meeting magic. Especially when the stakes are high, because disoriented, slightly flustered people are much more likely to:
be receptive to new ideas
be creative
empathize
innovate
identify links they couldn’t have seen otherwise
transcend preconceived notions or judgments about situations, people, and possibilities
learn something new about themselves and their peers
smile and laugh
be present
Where can I start? What does it take to create an effective warm-up?
My favorite tactic for creating effective warm-ups is to experience them prolifically and selectively add to my collection the ones I like best.
Attend lots of meetings and conferences. Because nearly every facilitator will use one, you’ll experience lots of them. And that will give you range.
Notice the different styles, lengths, complexity levels, tactics for virtual vs in-person, using physical props or accessible platforms for interaction virtually such as chat functions. Some use physical space and require individual or group movement. I’m sure YouTube has vast annals to select from.
Experiment. Try a bunch out for yourself. Get experience. Fail. Recalibrate. Most of all, get your feet wet. Not every one will work for every context, but begin your next family dinner or a date (an excellent way to vet openness!) with an experiment. See what you like, what you don’t, and what you want to do next time. Not every warm-up will work in every context, but visualize it in your head and you’ll generally do fine. Go for quantity, and quality will follow. Because experience.
Create a list or journal of what works. This can be your reference book for the future. Once you’ve cycled through a bunch of them, revisit old ones and refresh them.
Design your own! This is truly the best way to learn and get better at leading warm-ups. Take parts of different warm-ups you like and remix them. When creating a new warm-up, I generally:
—> Look at the main theme of the activity we’ll move into directly after the warm-up (or of the conference, event, mission of the company)
—> Incorporate at least one core value of the place / team you’re working with
—> If time permits, aim to build in at least 2-3 segments for your warm-up (1 is fine for shorter meetings), to stir it up with variety (different groupings of people doing the same activity, or add a layer to your prompt to go deeper, building on the initial prompt). This keeps things flowing and allows people to go deeper.
—> Be as inclusive as possible. Consider and create around what will allow everyone in your group to be successful, whether they are verbal, visual, tactile or movement-oriented, extroverts, introverts, people with disabilities, people without disabilities, across a broad range of ages, in-person, virtual, strangers, longtime collaborators, etc., etc.
—> Visualize the emotional arc of the warm-up. Think about how you want people to feel as they move into the next segment of the meeting or main activity. If you want them to feel uplifted, hopeful, focused, committed, inspired, or ready to work, start there and work backward, scaffold incrementally from an easy first step to ease the group past the initial discomfort (should be a group sigh—OK, I can do this…).
So, what’s your favorite warm-up?
(If you don’t yet have one, you’re welcome to email me and I’m down to share my favorite with you, no strings attached).
Not a warmup person? Maybe IDEO's blog post will change your mind!