CWA Blog Archive-Boost Your Setting Team's Creativity With These 5 Exercises

Boost Your Setting Team's Creativity With These 5 Exercises

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This article offers five exercises, which the author's team calls games, to reignite routesetting creativity when a team feels stuck. It opens with the charming questions new climbers ask setters, how do you know where to put the pieces, are you just making it up or do you draw a map, and the author's favorite, what computer program tells you where the pieces go. The author usually takes time to explain that yes, technically they're just making it up, but always with a target grade in mind and usually a movement assignment. The framing turns playful when a climber asked why the author moved a hold instead of keeping it where it was, and their immediate thought was because that's not what Gordon Ramsay would want to climb, a surreal flash of inspiration that hints at the imaginative exercises to come. The article acknowledges the real problem it addresses: while some days everyone shows up with fruitful ideas and is psyched to set, just as many days the team feels uninspired, stuck on one idea, or simply out of exciting ideas. To counteract that and promote experimentation, the author diverts the team to setting exercises, or games, to get everyone out of their heads. The throughline is that routesetting creativity isn't always spontaneous and can be deliberately stimulated through structured play. Recognizing that setting teams inevitably hit creative dry spells, uninspired, stuck, or out of fresh ideas, the author offers games as a practical remedy that pulls setters out of their mental ruts and sparks experimentation. The whimsical Gordon Ramsay thought and the affectionate account of climbers' misconceptions about setting establish a tone that setting is a creative craft, part technical, part imaginative, that benefits from playful exercises when inspiration runs dry. For setting teams and head setters, the article provides concrete tools to refresh creativity on demand rather than waiting for inspiration to strike, framing these games as a way to keep sets innovative and setters engaged even on the days when the ideas aren't flowing naturally.

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This piece offers five creativity exercises, or games, to help routesetting teams when they feel uninspired, stuck, or out of fresh ideas. Acknowledging that setting creativity isn't always spontaneous, the author uses structured play to pull setters out of mental ruts and spark experimentation, keeping sets innovative even on uninspired days.