Your Brainstorm Is Not Working. Here Is What to Do Instead.
Put 10 people in a room. Tell them to think outside the box.
What actually happens: two or three voices dominate, everyone else nods, and the most senior person's idea quietly wins. Nobody meant for it to go that way. It just does.
Unstructured group brainstorming has been consistently outperformed by structured alternatives since research on it began in the 1950s. The problem is not the people. It is the conditions.
Below are four activities we use at FUNdamentals of Play that actually shift those conditions, including one that involves a flying pig and one where the whole point is to fail spectacularly. Toronto teams tell us these sessions are the most fun they have had at work in years. The creativity that follows is not a coincidence.
First: Why Most Innovation Sessions Produce Nothing New 🧠
One stat worth knowing before we get to the activities.
Teams with psychological safety are 21 times more likely to contribute creative ideas, according to Google's Project Aristotle. That means the biggest barrier to innovation in most rooms is not a lack of ideas. It is the quiet fear of saying the wrong one.
According to Adobe's State of Creativity research, 41% of employees say their workplace actively stifles creativity. Not discourages. Actively stifles.
Every activity below is designed to lower that barrier first and let ideas follow. Silliness is not a side effect. It is the mechanism.
Activity 1: The Flying Pig Game (Playstorming) 🐷
The question: How many ways can you make a pig fly?
No pigs are harmed. No idea is too ridiculous. That is the whole point.
This is what we call Playstorming: facilitated ideation where the rules are deliberately inverted from every corporate brainstorm you have ever sat through.
- Quantity over quality. Volume is the goal, not brilliance.
- No judging. Not even a skeptical eyebrow.
- Silly is good. Silly is the point.
- Piggyback on each other's ideas. Build, extend, escalate.
Teams go hard. Jet-powered pig. Pig in a trampoline suit. Pig convinces eagles to carry it on a rotational basis. And then something shifts: once the room is laughing and the internal critic has gone quiet, the actually useful ideas start showing up too. The creative muscle warms up. The weird idea that was one pivot away from something real finally makes it out of someone's head.
The debrief connects it back to real work: where do you filter ideas before they are fully formed? What would happen if you stayed in quantity mode a little longer before you started evaluating?
Activity 2: Worst Possible Idea
Same Playstorming energy, different frame. Instead of asking your team for their best ideas, ask for the worst ones.
The most guaranteed-to-fail, most catastrophically bad, most embarrassing solutions to the actual problem you are trying to solve.
This works for the same reason Flying Pig works: it removes the fear of judgment completely. Nobody is protecting a bad idea. And once the terrible ideas are on the table, something interesting happens. The group starts noticing which bad ideas contain a useful kernel. Invert the worst one. Strip it back. Some genuinely good solutions come through exactly that reversal.
Run time: 20 minutes. Works in any group size. Zero materials required.
Activity 3: The Evolving Handshake (SCAMPER in Action) 🤝
This one teaches our SCAMPER framework without anyone knowing they are learning a framework. Which is the best way to teach anything.
SCAMPER stands for: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify or Modify, Put to Other Uses, Eliminate, Reverse. Seven creative lenses that force the brain off its default path.
Here is how it runs:
- Find a partner. Create a secret handshake together. Anything goes.
- Magnify: Make one element bigger, more dramatic, more ridiculous.
- Eliminate: Remove one element entirely. What is left?
- Reverse: Do the whole handshake backwards.
- Combine: Find another pair. Merge both handshakes into one. Somehow.
It is chaotic. It is joyful. And by the time teams debrief, they have applied four SCAMPER moves without a slide in sight. The conversation about using those same lenses on a real product, process, or challenge lands very concretely and very fast.
We have run this with teams across Toronto in financial services, healthcare, and tech. The response is always laughter first, genuine insight second.
If you want to see how team building builds real skills rather than just filling time, this is a good example.
Activity 4: Clapparama (And What Joyful Failure Actually Looks Like) 👏
This one looks simple. It is not.
The group stands in a circle. The goal is to pass a single clap around the circle, keeping the energy clean and fast. Once that works, a second clap gets introduced going the other direction. Then a double clap. Then a simultaneous clap. Multiple sequences running at once, different directions, different rhythms.
They will drop one. Probably several.
And here is the whole point: did they fail, or did they fail joyfully?
Watch what happens when a sequence breaks. Does someone groan and point fingers? Does the energy collapse? Or does the group laugh, reset, find a strategy, and go again? That is the real activity.
The debrief question is direct: in your actual work, when something does not go as planned, do you treat it as information or as a verdict? Teams that treat failure as new data, regroup faster, experiment more, and build on mistakes instead of burying them. That is not a soft idea. It is the difference between teams that iterate and teams that stall.
At FUNdamentals of Play, joyful failure is a full step in our Innovation PLAYshop because it is one of the hardest mindsets to build and one of the most valuable ones to have.
How to Make Innovation Stick 🔄
The biggest mistake after a session like this: nothing happens next.
Before the room clears, lock in three things: which ideas are worth a 30-day pilot, who owns each one, and what is the smallest first action this week. That is the difference between a great afternoon and something that actually changes how the team works.
The teams we see sustain creative output are the ones who build psychological safety into their regular rhythm, not just into offsites. Our employee engagement activities post covers some of the practical rituals that keep creative conditions alive between sessions.
Check out FUNdamentals of Play's Innovation PLAYshop to see how we run a full facilitated session for Toronto and Ontario teams, from Playstorming through SCAMPER to joyful failure and beyond.
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FAQ: Innovation Activities for Teams
Ready to Get Your Team to Actually Innovate? (Flying Pig Included) 🎉
If your team's last creative session produced polite agreement and a forgotten whiteboard, we should talk.
FUNdamentals of Play's Innovation PLAYshop runs your team through Playstorming, SCAMPER-based activities, and the kind of joyful failure that turns a dropped clap sequence into a genuine insight about how your team handles setbacks.
Book a free discovery call. We will start with your team's actual challenge, not a catalog.
No pitch deck. No pressure. Just a really good conversation.
👉 Let's play. 🎉
