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Brainstorming is a great way to pick everyone’s brain (Creative Thinking Activities for Employees) and develop new, exciting ideas.
We’re all familiar with the usual way of doing it. You go to a meeting room; you crack a few jokes and start a chaotic rant, a mindless stream of consciousness. Everyone is shouting. That one person who probably has excellent ideas but refuses to participate is being quiet and even more disengaged than usual.
Is Anyone Even Taking Notes?
The next day, no one remembers what was talked about. Stimulating your creativity is important, but it means nothing without taking action.
Let us tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a naturally creative person who had brilliant ideas but never acted upon them. And then, there was his colleague who wasn’t as creative but followed through with their ideas. After a while, the Follow-through guy advanced in his career and was quite successful, while the Naturally-creative guy never left his tedious desk job to pursue greatness.
“Well, How Else Are We Supposed to Come Up With Brilliant Ideas?”
How about a few exercises to spark creativity? Look, there is nothing wrong with the good old group brainstorming, but there are plenty of other ways to approach generating ideas more constructively.
Have you ever considered that there are creative ways to be creative and come up with innovative ideas? Creativity is a lazy beast, so you have to poke it in various ways to make it roar with the rage of brilliance and inspiration.
Here, we will look at alternative creativity exercises businesses and creatives can try in their next brainstorming session.
Chain Writing
This is one of the best exercises to increase creativity. Present your team with a problem. For example, how do we grow the company by 20% in the next six months?
Then, take a piece of paper, write down your ideas, and pass it to the person next to you. They read your thoughts and write down their suggestions. Then they pass it to the next in line, and so on. Ultimately, you have a list of ideas to consider and see what would work for your company.
The great thing about this method is that everyone can contribute, even the shy members of the team who rarely raise their voices. Even those who fear their ideas won’t be taken seriously have a way to share them less intimidatingly.
Reverse Thinking
Did you know that big corporations hire hackers to test their security? They pay to be hacked to figure out their weaknesses. Now, how can we apply this methodology to our endeavors?
Ask yourself what are my biggest challenges. What are the reasons that prevent me from reaching your goals? Or, what actions would you take if suddenly a big competitor appeared on the market out of the blue? How would you adapt to the situation?
Once you know your obstacles, break them down and closely examine their contributing factors. Though it can be difficult, you might also enlist the help of a close friend or colleague to help identify things holding you back.
Their unique perspective may help uncover issues you had not realized or considered.
Connection Finding
Here is one of the more popular creative thinking warm-up exercises. The next time you are having a meeting to discuss brilliant ideas, bring some random items with you.
Pick two seemingly unconnected items and ask everyone to determine their connection.
Let’s say you are discussing a Rubik’s cube and a metal gas lighter.
Make a list of the things that connect them. For example:
- Made on Earth
- By humans
- List of practical applications
- Etc.
Then, choose two or more concepts you are working on and determine their connections. This exercise can help you see aspects of your work that are less obvious. This shift in perspective and train of thought can be enough to spark meaningful creative ideas.
Alternative Leaders to Creative Thinking Activities for Employees
Here is one of the more fun creative games you can play with colleagues. What would your team do if Batman led it? Or Elon Musk?
Choose a fictional character or a real person to take over the leadership of your project. Imagine how they may prioritize or look at the task differently.
The best part is that you can pick anyone you like; the possibilities are endless. This activity can be fun and silly, but it might be the counterculture thinking your team needs to break out of their rut.
Wishful Thinking
Present your team with a problem and tell them to imagine that they have unlimited resources. How would they develop a solution if they had access to vast amounts of money, connections, and power?
Write down their ideas and discuss them. Try to break down their thoughts to figure out what obstacles the team is facing. What would their ideas look like if they were scaled down?
Review the answers and see what aspects could be implemented based on your current resources. You might stumble onto actionable ideas thanks to your wish world.
Six Thinking Hats
Creative challenges require creative thinking, but you can’t ignore the facts, difficulties, and dangers ahead. So here is a beneficial method that was presented by Edward de Bono in his book Six Thinking Hats in 1985. Each hat represents An idea through six different modes of thinking.
- The Blue Hat of Logic – Facts
- The Yellow Hat of Optimism – Values and Benefits
- The Black Hat of Pessimism – Difficulties and Dangers
- The Red Hat of Emotion – Feelings and intuitions
- The Green Hat of Creativity – Possibilities and New Ideas
- The Purple Hat of Management – Compliance
You can use this method to spur an in-depth brainstorming session. First, assign a hat to each team member and start a discussion. This will allow you to approach a project from multiple angles. To get the most original ideas, assign hats that challenge team members to think outside their comfort zone.
s.w.o.t.
S.W.O.T. stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s among the basic creative thinking exercises for entrepreneurs and is also commonly used for performance evaluations. But it can also be used as a helpful method to explore new ideas.
For example, if you are doing a SWOT analysis on a new marketing campaign, ask your team what they like about it (strengths), what is unappealing about it (weaknesses), how could it be improved (opportunities), and how does it hold up against your competitors (threads).
The important thing here is to balance the teams’ opinions and thoughts with the campaign’s data. Doing this extra step can give the team valuable consumer insights, such as where the team’s perception of quality and effectiveness diverges from consumer behaviors due to the campaign.
The Early Draft
You have a new project and don’t know where to start. This is where the early draft comes into play.
You need to make four different lists that include:
- What you know about the matter.
- What you should research.
- The reasons this is important and logical.
- Free-write some ideas, whatever comes to mind naturally.
The early draft of your project will look messy and confusing. But this is precisely the point.
It is a tool that helps you put your knowledge on paper and gets your gears moving.
Word Clusters
While this may seem like a fancy name for word associations, there is more to this method because it forces you to dig deeper.
Word association is often limited to just a few words, but clusters force you to expand your thinking. Your team can develop their word clusters broadly or in a detailed and granular way.
So, take a project or an idea and describe it with four different keywords. Let those be the pillars of your clusters.
Now, surround your pillars with related terms that come to mind naturally. Don’t stop until you have at least ten terms in each cluster. This way, you will end up with four lists that may allow you to see things in a new light.
Visual Thinking
How about some creative exercises for designers? You can still benefit from drawing things, even if you are not a designer or an illustrator.
Next time you’re brainstorming, bring paper and pencils. Focus on a concept and draw an image that you associate with what you are trying to achieve. Then, pass the paper to the next person and let them draw something.
In the end, you will have plenty to talk about. Examine the drawings and try to evaluate the connections that have been formed. You might stumble upon some brilliant ideas by introducing visuals into your brainstorming sessions.
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Scripting and Storyboards
This method is among the basic creativity exercises for writers, but anybody can use it.
Imagine that you and your team are characters in a movie who are trying to achieve something. What would the script be, and how would you represent these ideas through a storyboard?
Each section of the storyboard should represent a crucial step that you need to take to complete your project. This activity will likely spur some interesting discussion and may help the group identify how each team member depends upon another to achieve the larger goal. Communicating and being on the same page in this way is invaluable for your team’s success.
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