Group warmups create a collective brain

Why our little clapping games matter more than we realize

Millennium Projects (6th Series). ‘People and Places’

Warmups get a weird rap; they’re seen as a nice-to-have or an afterthought, a zip zap zoppy tag-on to an already fully baked experience.

Or on the flipside they can be overwrought; if you haven’t accidentally tagged on three too many questions to a roundtable introduction that gobbled half the session time and had people asking “Wait what was the question about burger toppings again??” you and I have different hosting shames.

Warmups do more than just energize, or align, or clear the mind. All of these assume we’re just altering the state of how the group already is – but we’re actually creating something brand new together. Warmups create a totally separate group consciousness. It’s our first building block towards a collective identity, whether that group continues for years or just the hour.

There’s a concept in game design called the Magic Circle, the idea that there is a threshold between the real world and the one created inside of a game state. Outside the tennis court, it would be strange for you to slam a little green ball as hard as you can into the horizon, but inside of the court this behavior makes sense because it’s an entirely new world in there. Gatherings are like this too – both because warmups are the threshold, and also because what they’re unlocking is an entirely new world for us.

What’s inside this new group world should surprise us. It should be uniquely of that place and people and time. It should be different next time if two more people show up.

Put another way: as hosts and gatherers, warmups help us set the table for something that isn’t from our brain, or fellow participants’ brains, but a third brain that can only exist in the moment we’re sharing together.

It’s why leaving summer camp or sleepovers as a kid felt so gutting; you just cultivated all that consciousness together, a third mind, and now you’re left with your own mind that feels lonely in comparison.

No matter what, a group warmup is an experience everyone in the room now officially has in common. A sort of first memory for the new group brain.

This reframe for me doesn’t so much change what I’m doing as much as it stokes the utter respect I have for the five minutes we spend doing it. We’re not all meeting some predetermined baseline, we’re generating something totally new.

Everything changes for me when I think about my role as helping to bring this third new group brain to life. It’s about ushering something fresh into being, hoping to be surprised, knowing that this is just the first step to something we’ll only experience together.

• Can’t wait to snag Strangers Need Strange Moments Together; is this book also popping up everywhere for you or is it just my extremely niche life experience??

• Speaking of warmups, one of my favorite sources is SessionLab – would love to hear what you think (thanks deb!)

• How to Design Unforgettable Experiences upcoming workshop by Olivia Vagelos aka the experience design and feelings master

• Got to visit with Alexis Madrigal at Local Economy in Oakland recently and am so inspired by their memberships model. Memberships are 1000% the future of community space!

• This piece on AI + integrity by Ayana Zaire Cotton won’t leave my brain. I slurp up every piece resisting this stupid status quo. “...it looks like aligning my work with my actual capacity (instead of my artificial capacity), slowing down the mornings, intentionally doing less than I think I’m “capable of” and doing a few things well instead of doing many things at once.”

• ‘From handwritten catalogs to thousands of orders’ YES more behind-the-scenes tell-alls from independent projects puhhhlease!

• What You Agents Are Doing in Your Hotels is such a good angle on the fascistic mundane of…ICE agents in hotels during their breaks from terrorizing our cities

• Saw SNÕÕPER last night and if I seem changed forever that’s why

• Made my first “pay it forward” gift from the GROUP HUG tip page – $150 to the bike co-op because that’s what inspired this newsletter for me! If you like what’s happening here, drop $5. Next pay it forward moment will happen this spring to another local org/project.

• This craft supplies table tent at the UnxDesign gathering on gatherings at Harvard this weekend – can this be a feature at every event??

or simply click that ₊˚.⋆⁺₊💜₊˚.⋆⁺₊ at the top if you indeed liked it, we always appreciate that here at group hug hq!! love to you all

💸 If you enjoyed this, consider dropping a buck in the GROUP HUG hat! This is an alternative to paid subscriptions to pass support from this newsletter onto groups in my town which I clearly draw all of my inspiration from.