October 2024
Creativity
“Collaboration is not about gluing together existing egos. It's about the ideas that never existed until after everyone entered the room.”
– Unknown
Prompt:
Sometimes we need to break things up with some fun and laughter. This month we have two activities that will bring fun and levity to your monthly meeting and hopefully inspire some creativity among your team. Creativity often can get squashed or dulled when we get busy. Our teams focus on execution and get too far into the weeds or too exhausted to make creative MIBE’s to our products and processes. When we tap into creative activities though, it enhances our problem solving skills, improves productivity, energizes us, and improves our overall mood. Creativity has also been linked to helping people live longer and healthier lives.
Activities:
Before the meeting break your team into groups of three or four people. Give each group a table and place a post it note with the names for each group on the corresponding table. We recommend strategically creating the groups by putting people from different departments and levels of hierarchy together.
1) Random Expert
Tell the team that we are fortunate, because today we have some of the world’s leading experts in the room on a variety of topics and we are going to get to interview them. Then tell everyone that they are the experts! It is helpful for groups to spread out around the room and we recommend they stand up for this exercise. Team members will take turns being the "expert" on a random topic. Each group will select one person to go first. You will then announce the first topic (we have provided “random expert” topics for you in your envelope) in which that person is an expert and say "Go!" The rest of the group members will then interview them by asking questions. Open ended questions are best and if short answers are given, use the phrase "tell me more about that." The expert should answer immediately without hesitation and with extreme confidence because they are the world's leading expert in this field. After about 2 minutes, switch experts and announce the new topic. Continue until everyone in each group has gone.
The goal for this exercise is to see how creativity can be accessed when you bypass your filter. By going fast and not overthinking answers, we tap into creativity we didn't know existed. It also helps that this is a situation where you don't have to be afraid to be wrong, because it's silly and fun.
PROMPTS
1) Cooking with power tools
2) Meat based vegetables
3) Teaching lions how to skip
4) Houses made of cotton balls
5) Lawn mowing aerobics
Questions
Was it harder to be the expert or interviewer? Why
What surprised you about this exercise?
How can the lessons learned here be used in our day-to-day activities?
2) Half Baked
On a post it poster sheet draw a line down the middle and write nouns/verbs on one side and adjectives on the other. Have the group shout out some random nouns or verbs, capture them on post it notes and place them on the post-it poster sheet. Then do the same with adjectives. Capture 2-3 more than the number of groups you have. Then tell the team that you need one representative from each group to raise their hand - when they've raised their hands - instruct them to run up to the front of the room and grab one noun/verb and one adjective and bring it back to their table.
Once everyone has two post it notes, tell the teams that those two words are now the name of their new company and that the teams are going to be responsible for giving a pitch to potential investors for their new start-up. Have each team say the name of their company. It might get weird, that’s okay! We had Hairy Denver, Serving Crunchy, Paint Silly, Hiding Moist, Cute Tiger and Loud Boobs. Give each team a large post-it poster sheet and 10 minutes to come up with what their company does, the market for their product, the problem they solve and the key benefits. Logos are encouraged. Then have each team come up and do a 2 minute pitch about their company.
Questions
What was the hardest part of this exercise?
What surprised you about this exercise?
How can we infuse more creativity into what we do everyday?
