How to Jumpstart Your Organisation's Creativity
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16 different ways to spark more creative and innovative thinking in your organization.
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How to Jumpstart Your Organisation's Creativity
- 1. How to Jump-Start Your Organization’s Creativity Dr. Mazlan Abbas
- 2. ONE-A-DAY
- 4. IDEA LOTTERY
- 11. HALL OF FAME
- 12. LEFT AND RIGHT BRAINS
- 13. IDEA QUOTAS
- 15. CHANGE “YES, BUT…” TO “YES, AND…”
- 16. THREE WAYS
- 17. FRESH EYES
- 18. THE END
- 19. Contact Dr. Mazlan Abbas @mazlan_abbas
Editor's Notes
- Ask each person to try to improve one aspect of their job each day, focusing on the areas within their control. At the end of the day, people should meet and ask each other what they did differently and better than it was the day before.
- Put up a bulletin board in a central area and encourage people to use it to brainstorm ideas. Write a theme or problem on a colored card and place it in the center of the board. Provide pieces of white paper on which people can write their ideas to post on the board. E.g. suppose you have difficulty closing a particular sale. You could describe the sale situation on a colored card, post it on the brainstorming board and ask people to post their ideas and suggestions.
- Have a monthly "idea lottery," using a roll of numbered tickets. Each time a person comes up with a creative idea, he or she receives a ticket. At the end of each month, share the ideas with the staff and then draw a number from a bowl. If the number on anyone's ticket corresponds to the number drawn, he or she gets a prize. If no one wins, double the prize for the next month.
- Provide a special area for people to engage in creative thinking. Stock the area with books, videos on creativity, as well as learning games and such toys as beanbags and modeling clay. You might even decorate the area with pictures of employees as infants to suggest the idea that we're all born spontaneous and creative.
- Ask people to display items on their desks that represent their own personal visions of creativity in business. For example, a crystal ball might represent a view toward future markets, a bottle of Heinz catsup might represent a personal goal of 57 new ideas on how to cut expenses, and a set of jumper cables might symbolize the act of jump-starting your creative juices to get more sales.
- Encourage weekly lunch-time meeting of three to five employees to engage in creative thinking. Ask meeting participants to read a book on creativity; each person can read a different chapter and share ways of applying creative thinking to the organization. Invite creative business people from the community to speak to the group. You could ask them for ideas on how to become more creative in your business.
- Present each person with a notebook. Call the notebook the "Bright Idea Notebook," and ask everyone to write three ideas in the notebook every day for one month on how to improve your business. At the end of the month, collect all the notebooks and categorize the ideas for further discussion.
- Make idea generating fun. Have a "Stupid Idea" week and stage a contest for the dumbest ideas. Post entries on a bulletin board and conduct an awards ceremony with a prize. You'll enjoy the camaraderie and may find that the stupid ideas stimulate good ones.
- Establish a "creative-idea" committee made up of volunteers. The goals of the committee should be to elicit, discuss, and implement employee's ideas. The committee can record the number of ideas on a thermometer-type graph. The company should recognize and reward people according to the quantity and quality of their creative contributions.
- Turn an office hallway into an Employee Hall of Fame. Post photographs of those whose ideas are implemented along with a paragraph about the person, the idea, and its impact on the company.
- When brainstorming in a group, try dividing the group into left-brain (rational) thinkers and right-brain (intuitive) thinkers. Ask the left-brainers to come up with practical, conventional and logical ideas; ask the right-brainers to come up with far-out, unconventional and nonlogical ideas. Then combine the groups and share the ideas.
- Thomas Edison guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. A way to guarantee creativity is to give each employee an idea quota of, say, five new ideas a week.
- Require everyone to bring one new idea as their ticket of admission to any group meeting. The idea should focus on some aspect of their job and how they can improve what they do.
- Someone offers an idea in a meeting, and many of us are tempted to say "Yes, but ..." To change this mind set , whenever someone says "Yes, but ..." require the person to change "Yes, but ..." to "Yes, and ..." and continue where the last person left off.
- People shouldn't waste time thinking of reasons why something can't work or can't be done. Instead, they should think about ways to make something work, and then get it done. Ask everyone to think of three job-related goals, targets, or tasks they think can't be accomplished. Then ask them to figure out three ways to accomplish each of them. Then do the same thing yourself.
- Jonas Salk, developer of the vaccine that eradicated polio, made it a standard practice to assemble men and women from different domains to his group sessions. He felt this practice helped him bring out new ideas that could not arise in the minds of individuals who were from the same domain. Invite people from other departments to your brainstorming sessions and ask them how they would solve your problems.