Bring squiggle birds to your workshops

A collection of squiggle birds from a service mapping workshop.

Most every workshop begins with a tense mood.

Sometimes it’s curiosity, sometimes it’s anxiety, and sometimes it’s the silent hum of busy people wondering why they’ve been pulled into yet another meeting.

I’ve learned that the first 10 minutes determine everything that follows. If people start tight, self-conscious, or stuck in “work mode”, collaboration becomes mechanical and the outcomes are less exciting.

Creativity demands a certain looseness — social, mental, and emotional. So before we do anything serious, I like to ask everyone to make something completely unserious: a Squiggle Bird.

It’s fast, silly, and absurd — but it works every single time by resetting the energy in the room, unlocking creative thinking, and reminding people that good ideas rarely start polished.

A birdy intervention

Squiggle Birds is a fast fun drawing exercise I love to use at the start of workshops with stakeholders that requires creative thinking.

Each participant gets a pen and a post-it note and I ask them to quickly draw a loose and fluid squiggle. Then they must rotate the post-it note, looking for a form that feels bird-like, and then quickly add three simple elements: eyes, a beak, and legs. Nothing more.

Finally, they give their bird a name and a short backstory — what kind of bird it is and what its special ability or unique trait might be.

Once everyone’s finished, we go around the room and share them.

The whole thing takes about 10 minutes.

The simplicity is deliberate. No skill required, no right answers. Just some silly and unexpected play.

Creativity is pattern recognition

Squiggle birds taps into a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia : our brain’s tendency to find patterns and familiar forms in noise, like seeing faces in clouds.

By looking for “the bird” within a random squiggle, participants engage the part of our minds that recognises patterns, metaphors, and stories.

The constraint of only adding eyes, a beak, and legs prevents overthinking and encourages playfulness. Everyone knows what birds look like and they're surprisingly easy to find in squiggles.

Rotating the post-it is crucial. It forces people to view something from multiple perspectives, breaking rigid thought patterns and gently opening people up to reinterpretation, curiosity, and flexibility — exactly the mindset needed for true creative work.

What begins as doodling becomes a small rehearsal for recognising possibility in what (at first) appears to be chaos.

Play as social glue and hierarchy leveller

Workshops often bring together people from every level of an organisation — from workers to managers to C-suite execs.

Within minutes, Squiggle Birds has people laughing at their misshapen bird drawings, comical names, and silly stories. Atmospheres shift from polite formality to shared amusement.

That collective silliness is very powerful. In environments where people are used to performing competence, it gives permission to be curious, imperfect, and human. It resets the room.

Before any structured activity begins, the group has already built the foundations of some psychological safety and trust — the real and very necessary conditions for creativity to thrive.

Imperfection as a principle

Many of my workshops involve sketching wireframes, mapping flows and journeys, and visualising concepts. Squiggle Birds quietly sets the tone for that work: we’re not here to make art; we’re here to communicate with clarity. It provides that essential reminder that creativity is about communicating intent not precision.

The constraint (only eyes, a beak, and legs) lowers the bar on “good enough”, so that people stop polishing and start expressing.

In 10 minutes it teaches a few non-negotiables:

Speed over neatness: we’ll move quickly, iterate, and refine together; perfection isn’t the goal.

Clarity over polish: a rough mark that others can understand beats a neat drawing that says nothing.

Visual beats verbal: short text is easily misinterpreted; a simple sketch anchors a shared understanding.

Safety to show unfinished work: the silly birds normalise imperfection: sketches feel low-stakes and collaborative.

Practically, this means that for the rest of the workshop people are comfortable making rough sketches, labelling parts, drawing arrows, and talking through intent. The bar is simple and low: can someone else grasp the idea well enough to discuss or build on it?

More about Birds

Read this simple guide to run Squiggle Birds at your next workshop, or even better, get in touch with me and we can do it together.