Exercises for Enhancing Lateral Thinking at Work

Hack Your Team's Mindset: 5 Unconventional Warmups for Innovation Workshops 🧠⚡ Ever run an innovation workshop that felt like trying to start a car with a dead battery? That first 30 minutes determines whether you'll get breakthrough ideas or recycled thinking. Something that I call getting into the “psychology of innovation”. After facilitating several sessions, I've discovered something surprising: the traditional "let's go around and introduce ourselves" kills creative energy before it starts. Your team's brains are still in operational mode—not possibility mode. Here are five unconventional warmups I've tested that rewire neural pathways for innovation in under 20 minutes: 1. The Impossible Question Challenge 🔥 Start by asking questions that have no "correct" answers: "How would you design a restaurant on Mars?" or "What if sleep became optional?" This immediately signals we're breaking free from conventional thinking. 2. The Reality Bending Exercise ✨ Have everyone write down three "unchangeable facts" about your industry. Then challenge teams to imagine a world where each "fact" is no longer true. As Steve Jobs said, "Reality can be distorted"—this exercise trains that muscle. 3. The Reverse Assumptions Game 🔄 List 5-10 core assumptions about your business. Then systematically reverse each one: "What if we charged more for less?" or "What if our customers became our employees?" This shatters mental models almost instantly. 4. The "Yes, And..." Chain Reaction ⛓️ One person proposes a wild idea. Instead of evaluating it, the next person must say "Yes, and..." adding something to evolve it further. Continue for 3-5 minutes. This dismantles our innate criticism reflex. 5. Two-Minute Futures ⏱️ Give everyone two minutes to draw what your industry will look like in 2040. The time constraint bypasses the analytical brain and accesses the intuitive one. The crude drawings often reveal surprising insights about shared hopes and fears. Remember: Innovation doesn't need fancy frameworks—it needs minds free from invisible constraints. These warmups aren't just games; they're pattern-disruptors that help your team escape their mental programming. What's your go-to innovation warmup? Have you tried activities that break conventional thinking patterns? #InnovationWorkshops #CreativeThinking #DesignThinking #TeamFacilitation #Creativity #TransformativeMindset

I try to destroy my business at least once a quarter. You may have heard of the Tibetan Monks who meticulously build sand mandalas only to destroy them as soon as they finish. After watching them finish one, I asked why they destroy them. He smiled and said, “To create, one must first learn to destroy.” Well, he didn’t exactly say that, but that’s the lesson I learned. It’s now the same thing I do with my company as CEO. It’s the "Kill the Company" exercise. It works like this: Once per quarter, I gather together a strategic group of people and ask them to plot against Merlin and find ways to destroy our company. I remind them that while the goal of this exercise is to come out with some new insights and out-of-the-box ideas, I don’t want them thinking outside the box. I want them to set the box on fire and dance around the flames. Sounds counterintuitive, right? Why waste time imagining your own downfall? Remember Blockbuster? They laughed at Netflix. Now they're the ultimate cautionary tale. That’s why. If you're not trying to understand how you can be disrupted, someone else will do it for you. By looking past simply surviving, and embracing the possibility of your own downfall, you learn a thing or two about how to prevent it. But don’t let that fool you. This exercise is not just about prevention. It's about powerful innovation. In the words of a Silicon Valley CEO I know: **“We don't innovate to stay ahead. We innovate because it's fun to blow sh*t up.”** Revel in the discomfort of your team as they plot against you. In that discomfort, you will find a spark of true innovation – not the watered-down, focus-grouped, risk-averse ideas that pass for creativity in lesser companies. Remember: In the coliseum of commerce, it's not enough to defeat your enemies. True victory comes from defeating yourself, over and over again, emerging stronger and smarter each time. If you don’t believe me, try it and prove me wrong. I promise it won’t be a waste of time. Plus, it’s pretty fun. #music #creativeproblemsolving #CEO #lateralthinking #entrepreneur #creativity #musicindustry

How to start creating fresh and innovative ideas for any problem in under 5 minutes. 1. Define the problem 2. Go to your bookshelf. 3. Pick any book 4. Flip through the book and stop on any page. 5. Read the first complete sentence you see. 6. Force yourself to make connections between the sentence and your problem. 7. Write down as many ideas as possible, no matter how silly. 8. Hint: Let your mind wander if it needs to. 9. Stop when 5 minutes are up. Creative coaches call this juxtapositional thinking. I call it the Oracle Technique because this is precisely the thinking the oracles in every religion try to evoke. And I do it at the start of every Generalists project. Because new ideas are precisely what they sound like. New. And they are created only when two ideas that seem to have nothing to do with each other come together. That's literally what happens in the brain. Every time a new idea is formed, two unconnected synapses come together. But the human brain is lazy. It doesn't want to do that. It wants to look for solutions among the many apparent connections it's already made. You've got to make your brain used to making these types of connections. Starting every project with a juxtapositional exercise is a great way to break through that. It's like exercise. It may not result in an immediate solution. But it will put you in the right mindset to find one sooner rather than later. p.s There are no new ideas. There are only better ones. Add even then, they are only better for the circumstances you are in. Get over yourself. p.s.s 10. If it takes you more than 5 minutes to start making connections, your probably trying to solve the wrong problem. p.s.s.s Your oracle doesn't have to be a sentence in a book. It could be anything. Here are some other examples of Oracles I've heard people use. 1. The first thing you hear a stranger say. 2. The first Linkedin post you see 3. A random place on a map. 4. A deck of cards 5. The results of a random word typed into Wikipedia. 6. Random words types into Midjourney Try using the below image as an oracle for a problem you are currently working on.

The New York Times offered an incredible five-day Creativity Challenge that perfectly illustrates ideas I teach about constraints, curiosity & deliberate practice: Day 1: Ten-Circle Doodles → Classic divergent-thinking warm-up. Flood the page with possibilities before judgment kicks in; fluency precedes originality. Day 2: Rule-Bound Poetry → My research shows that sometimes tight choice constraints (think Dr. Seuss’s 50-word limit) help steer us, avoiding decision paralysis when encountering too many options. Day 3: Intentional Daydreaming → Incubation matters. A mundane walk or dish-washing break lets subconscious networks recombine ideas in surprising ways. Day 4: The “10 Percent More” Rule → In class I push students to find 100 uses for a toothpick, then insist on 10 percent more after they think they’re done. That extra stretch reliably unveils the most inventive answers. Day 5: One New Thing → Even a tiny detour (new route to work, unfamiliar dish) expands our mental “parts bin,” enriching future idea combinations. Takeaway: Creativity isn’t lightning from the gods; it’s a muscle—strengthened by structured constraints, strategic pauses, and just a bit more effort than feels comfortable. Did you try the challenge? If not, check it out here: https://lnkd.in/e8eJtq82

Logic is the Chief of Staff’s comfort zone—spreadsheets, frameworks, tidy project plans. Yet sometimes, all the rational planning in the world won’t spark real buy-in. Different stakeholders bring different perspectives, and another checklist may just make eyes glaze over. This can baffle those who assume a rational plan should solve rational problems. And unfortunately, for some, more logic isn't the fix. Recently, I joined a workshop by Jared John R. on “Bringing Delight into Facilitation Work” that offered a refreshing twist: investing more in lateral thinking. Instead of piling on more data and logic to problem-solving exercises, lateral thinking uses creative, indirect prompts to uncover blind spots and create new insights. One example is the “worst-case scenario” exercise: - Instead of asking, “How can we succeed next year?” flip it to: “What could cause everything to fail?” - By surfacing threats that people often overlook, you get more raw, grounded, and ultimately actionable solutions... rather than a wishlist of all the great things a team could do (how we normally think). It’s a strong (and, dare I say, fun!) way to rally teams when logic-first methods aren’t cutting it. Some leaders crave a spark of delight or a curveball to break through the deadlock. That’s where lateral thinking shines: it shows angles that spreadsheets and experiential bias alone can’t uncover. And blending structured planning with creative, lateral thinking prompts can turn offsites and leadership sessions from predictable processes into genuine explorations. It’s in these moments that ideas emerge, dialogue happens, and everyone goes home with energy more energy than when they started. A question for fellow operators and CoS pros: When did a creative or offbeat prompt make all the difference for a team that was otherwise stuck in logic-first mode? Feel free to share—there’s a lot we can learn from each other’s experiences.