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What types of warm up activity are suitable to use on a learning and development programme?

If I am running a management development programme with diverse people from different organisations or from different parts of the same organisation who do not know each other then I will often make use of the initial introductions session to help people find their voice and to give them the chance to speak about themselves and their role and their experience. This can be expanded to include things from their past, current state or future hopes and expectations.
I might also use another neutral warm up device like asking them to describe what their “ideal alternative career choice” might be or to describe their other 9 lives.

When working with groups of people from the same organisation I would often ask them to talk about something that they share in common but would also have an individual perspective on such as “What is going well” for them and “What are they struggling with” at work currently. This again gets them to think about and vocalise their current reality situation and gives all participants and the trainer a sense of their attitude set at that time. I might also ask them to describe their "hopes and fears" for this work to guage their attitudes to it.

Another good warm up activity for teams is “Colour Blind” which requires the participants to solve a puzzle using plastic shapes in different colours while they are blind folded and deprived of one of their senses. They are forced to listen well to each other and communicate their thoughts clearly if they are to solve the problem. It also provides a high level of interaction and produces a sense of teamwork for all involved together in a somewhat unusual and slightly disadvantaged state.

If the training module that I am facilitating has a strong element of change involved then I will sometimes use this “change activity” where participants face each other in two lines and are asked to turn around and face away from a partner and to change 3 aspects of their physical appearance, then to turn back to face their partner again and to observe and hopefully point out the 3 things that each person has changed. We then repeat this request 3 times and the change task becomes increasingly more difficult to perform and to pick up. Participants often start to get creative and work together with each other to share and find new ways of making these changes. This activity gets people active, involved, on their feet and communicating with each other. It certainly “breaks the ice” for participants and also provides a lot of rich material to introduce a discussion about resistance to change, overcoming barriers to change and how to help others to change.