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There’s a moment at the start of many group gatherings that frequently gets handled badly. Someone says something like: “Right, let’s go around and say our names and an interesting fact about ourselves.”
The group visibly tightens. People start mentally rehearsing their interesting facts. Someone panics that they don’t have one. Someone else decides their interesting fact is that they once met a Z-list celebrity, rehearses it, delivers it, and watches it land with a polite smile. The whole exercise takes 8-10 minutes and achieves nothing except a vague sense that everyone now wishes they were somewhere else.
What We’re Actually Trying to Do
We don’t use the word ‘icebreaker’ because it implies that the group is frozen; that people are obstacles to be cracked open. We prefer the term ‘warm up’ because we’re not shattering anything. We’re just gradually and gently raising the temperature until the conversation can flow more easily.
In that spirit, we also never say, “now let’s warm up” because it’s not something people are used to doing outside a spin class and it can create anxiety. Instead we just jump straight in.
With that distinction in mind, before you can design a good warm up, you need to be honest about what you’re trying to achieve, which may be any or all of the following…
Create energy and focus. You want people present and awake, not distracted by the thing they just left or half-asleep from the rigors of their day.
Get people speaking early. Facilitators consistently observe that people who haven’t spoken in the first few minutes of a gathering are less likely to speak at all. A warm up breaks that seal.
Prime the brain. The right question, asked in just the right way, can orient the group’s thinking towards the territory you’re about to explore together.
A warm up is not intended to be a team-building exercise, a personality test, or an opportunity for the facilitator to seem creative.
Why Most Attempts Fail
Many such activities fail for one of a handful of predictable reasons.
They’re too personal too fast. Asking someone to share their biggest regret, their values, or a pivotal moment in their life before the group has established any trust is a form of psychological ambush. People either perform vulnerability they don’t feel, or they retreat behind a safe, surface-level answer.
They create winners and losers. “What’s the weirdest food you’ve ever eaten?” rewards people with exotic travel histories. “What’s the furthest you’ve run?” excludes anyone who doesn’t run (which, let’s face it, is many of us!). Any question that inadvertently ranks people, by experience, education, confidence, or wit, will create division rather than connection before the meeting has even started.
They put a premium on being interesting. Some questions effectively ask: be entertaining, right now, in front of these people. For extroverts, this is a gift. For everyone else, it’s an instruction to perform. The loud voices dominate, the quieter ones learn to wait it out, and the group may fracture along the fault lines it was probably trying to bridge.
They’re too long or too complex. “What are the top ten things you learned at the conference?” is not a warm up question. It’s an assignment. The same goes for anything that requires genuine reflection, preparation, or a structured answer. Warm ups should be light enough that people can engage with them in real time, without preparation.
There’s also a subtler problem that often goes unnoticed. When people are asked to think of something interesting about themselves (a fun fact, a unique skill, a memorable story), they stop listening. The room is now full of people half-present, internally editing their answer, rehearsing the words, worrying about the impression they’ll make. The warm up that was meant to create connection produces the opposite: a group of individuals isolated inside their own heads.
The Right Question for the Right People at the Right Time
As facilitator Dorothy Strachan put it:
The right questions for the right people at the right time are at the heart of a healthy group process.
This means there is no universally perfect warm up question, only contextually appropriate ones. Before you choose, ask yourself three things:
How well do these people know each other? A close-knit team that meets daily can handle more depth than a group of strangers at a conference. If familiarity is low, err on the side of lighter and more universal themes. If familiarity is high, you can afford something with a little more texture.
What is the purpose of this gathering? A warm up for a strategy session should feel different from one opening a team social. The question you choose can do quiet work here, signalling the tone, the level of seriousness, and the kind of thinking you’ll be doing together.
How much time do you have? A warm up should be proportional to the overall length of the gathering. In a ninety-minute session, 2-3 minutes of warm up is about right. In a full-day workshop, you can afford something a little more expansive (perhaps 5-10 minutes).
A good warm up gives everyone a lane of their own choosing. The best questions work not because everyone gives the same kind of answer, but because the question is genuinely open. It accommodates the reflective person and the jokester, the newcomer and the veteran, the person having a terrible week and the one riding a wave of good news.
Warm Ups That Actually Work
Here are the ones we come back to again and again…
😃 What made you smile this week?
The purest warm up on this list. It’s positive without being relentlessly upbeat, personal without being invasive, and genuinely open. There are no wrong answers. It works with strangers and it works with colleagues who’ve known each other for years. Use it when in doubt.
🍑 What is a food that brings you joy, and why?
Food is universal in a way that almost nothing else is. This question is warmer and slightly more revealing than it first appears. The ‘why’ does real work, and people’s answers often say something deep about comfort, memory, or culture without anyone having to be explicit about those things.
👶 What’s a random thing you were briefly obsessed with as a kid?
The word ‘briefly’ is where the action is here. It signals that this doesn’t have to be a defining passion. It can be something small, forgotten, slightly absurd. To take the PeopleStorming crew as an example, Rachel used to collect stickers of all kinds, Andre memorized the Star Trek technical manual cover-to-cover and Gemma went through a phase of only eating yellow food! 🌽
This levels the playing field between introverts and extroverts because it’s nostalgic and oddly specific: the kind of memory that surfaces easily and naturally, without the pressure to be impressive.
🎙️ What could you talk about for hours?
Deceptively good. It reveals something real about a person but it does so on their own terms. The answers are often surprising in ways that build real connection: the project manager who can talk endlessly about Dickensian costumes, or the developer who knows everything about Olympic lifting.
🧑💻 How would one of your parents describe what you do for work?
This one almost always gets a laugh. The warm, slightly resigned laugh of someone imagining their parents trying to explain “product strategy” or “agile retrospectives” at the dinner table. It works at virtually any familiarity level.
🎶 What’s a song that drags you back to your school days?
Music is a powerful trigger for memory and emotion, and this question harnesses that power without pushing anyone into difficult territory. It lives in that ‘admitting a former guilty pleasure’ territory that everyone can relate to. It also travels well across age groups: the song will be different but the feeling is the same.
🪄 If you could magically duplicate yourself, what would the other version of you do with their days?
This one sits slightly apart from the others. It’s more imaginative (and requires a little more from people), but what it gets in return is genuinely illuminating. The answers reveal what people feel they don’t have time for, what they wish they were doing, what pulls at them alongside their actual lives. Use it when the group has a little more familiarity.
🏝️ On a deserted island. You get three items. What’s your one practical tool, your one entertainment item, and your one comfort food?
This one is a classic for a reason. We also tend to frame it to exclude your smartphone and internet devices since that tends to get us all to the more interesting answers.
For Something More Involved
The questions above all work within a few minutes. But sometimes you want something that does more. Something that warms up not just the people but also their thinking. Here are two of our favourites…
The Random Business Pitch
Give each person three random cards showing a simple image or concept. You can use thinklinks.cards for this (free external resource). Their task is to pitch the business or service they’d set up based on those three cards (e.g. cake, dog, basket). Inspired by Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking work, this is a rapid creative exercise that reveals how people think, it generates genuine laughter, and (if your session involves any kind of innovation or problem-solving work) serves as perfect priming for the workshop ahead. The constraint is the point: the randomness forces connections that wouldn’t otherwise get made.
What Would You Call This?
Show the group an image of a real object (ideally something slightly unusual or overlooked) and ask each person to give it a new fictional name that suits it. Ask for a name that captures something about how it looks, how it feels, or what it does.
For example, you might show a picture of a whisk and ask what it would be called if nobody had ever named it before. You’d then get answers like the spaghetti cage, a wire bloom, the Spinster. It’s a naming exercise, a creativity exercise, and a small act of collective play. It can also tell you a great deal about how people see the world. Like the ThinkLinks exercise, it’s best used when the session itself will benefit from a ‘right-brain’ warm up.
If you’re looking for your team to have a deeper connection, our Navigating Work Styles group session takes this further by helping teams connect through structured conversation and play, for groups of 10–100 people.