Creativity

The purpose of this exercise is to get the delegates think creatively about the future of technology. Invariably, people are affected by technology and many great ideas originate from people who are not necessarily working on the technical aspects of a new domain, but those who might simply see a need for something and think why a particular service or product has not already been made.

This creativity process benefits companies to become more innovative as they can use all their staff’s brain pool to get creative ideas.

This exercise is by design rather general. Based on your own specific domain you can focus the exercise on specific topics.

In today’s competitive world, coming up with creative ideas sooner than your competitor can make all the difference between success and failure. However, creativity is not something that you can force people into or expect them to suddenly become creative by sheer will power.

Instead, creativity seems to be highly dependant on the state of your mind. It is about your brain. If you can provide a suitable environment for your brain, it can deliver many novel ideas rather quickly. On the other hand, a tired or stressed mind is almost useless for anything creative as if it can’t be set free.

Hence, to become creative you should simply focus on setting up your environment and adopt your behaviour in such a way to maximise your chances of success.

This article provides a series of guidelines you can use to become more creative.

In this exercise, delegates will learn how to use futures wheel to perform a structured brainstorming to predict the future of a specific topic or systematically capture the effect of various future developments on each other.

The method is a simple yet powerful visual technique that is widely used by people involved in understanding the consequences of change or development.

This is a fun activity which generates a lot of laughter and therefore is ideal as an energiser especially after a long training session. This exercise works best with groups of people who know each other already; however it can be used with new teams as well.

In this exercises delegates learn to use analogies to find novel solutions to problems. Specific analogies are examined and mapped to a problem domain for inspiration of similar unique solutions.

When engaged in a brainstorming session on productivity, you want to maximise your search efficiency in order to systematically explore all areas and get the best from the time spend on the problem. A great way to do this is to expand and shrink the problem so you can come up with new ideas, get rid of the bad ideas and move forward.

Effectively, you can use the following 5 techniques:

• Expand. Expand the problem by thinking of new associations on all directions.
• Reduce. Reduce the scope.
• Reverse. Come up with something opposite to explore new avenues.
• Eliminate. Remove those ideas that don’t make any sense to reduce your search space and increase the efficiency of your brainstorming. After all, you can’t spend forever on this topic so you need to setup boundaries.

The following exercise helps the delegates to use this method.

This activity encourages solution generation by looking at the problem from a different prospective. By changing the way we describe a problem we can come up with ideas to fix it. This exercise works best with a group of delegates who normally work together or belong to the same organisation.

This exercise encourages creativity and helps delegates to come up with a larger variety of solutions. The activity also enables participants to evaluate and compare the influence and effect of using expert views in solving problems. This activity is suitable for groups of people who have access to Internet and phone during the training session.

This is a fun activity which encourages delegates to become creative with their ideas and share them with others. They will learn the value of quick thinking and quick judgement since sometimes you may need to rely on gut instincts to cut your search space and save time looking for solutions. If the delegates know each other or are from the same organisation, a common problem can be chosen as the main topic which helps them to use this exercise to brainstorming the problem.

Some people believe that they are not creative. The belief comes to define their attitude towards any problem and can limit their capability irrespective of their creative ability. Almost everyone is creative and uses that creativity on a daily basis in everyday tasks such as cooking, rearranging furniture, professional organisational skills, report writing and so on. Unfortunately, they may not see these activities as creative. It is a good idea to push these individuals into classic creative tasks to show them that they can be just as creative as others if they want to. Once their self-limiting attitude is corrected, their confidence is increases and they can start to see their own talent. The viscous cycle can be broken.

This fun and creative exercise allows participants to work within a team and brainstorm different ideas to come up with the right answer.

This is a fun activity which can be used as an energiser or icebreaker within any group of people. The physical movement associated with this exercise makes it ideal for long training sessions where participants have to sit down for a long time.

This engaging activity is suitable for most teams, especially for new teams where team members still have to know each other well.

This simple yet engaging energiser is suitable for all age groups but is ideal for 8 to 15 years old. This creative game can serve as a good energiser or even an icebreaker.

This is a fun icebreaker to use at the beginning of any course with a group of people who are not familiar with each other. The trainer as well as the participants can use this exercise to introduce themselves to the group.