Creativity has been defined as ‘making inspired connections’:
- Connections between unmet consumer needs … and business capabilities
- Connections between materials functionality … and practical challenges
- Even connections between product attributes … and consumer beliefs
Creative ideation workshops can be a brilliant place to help your teams make these connections.
But creating the insightful, imaginative atmosphere that encourages connection-making can be a challenge. Especially if the workshop participants aren’t in the right mindset.
That’s why it’s so important to introduce fun, energising activities into workshop sessions – whether at the beginning of a meeting to relax your delegates and unleash their creative spirit, or mid-session to refresh and re-energise them when they’ve hit a mental block.
That’s why we’re happy to share some of the physical and mind-games we find useful to stimulate and reset team thinking – they’re all designed to get the team working together, thinking more creatively and approaching challenges from a fresh perspective.
Juke Box Heroes:
Split the group into two teams. Give them two minutes to write as many song titles as they can featuring a chosen word, such as ‘love’, ‘baby’, ‘Christmas’ (depending on the time of year!) or ‘you’. When the time’s up count the results and award the team with the most correct answers the title of Juke Box Heroes.
This is another useful exercise to reset a team’s thinking and revitalise their connection-making processes before tackling the next challenge.
Yes! No!:
Pick a member of the team to sit in the ‘hot seat’ and have the rest of the group fire questions at them for two minutes. The answerer must respond to all questions without using ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – if they make a mistake the person who asked that question will take their place and become the questioned. Whoever is in the seat when the time is up is the winner.
Things can get a bit raucous with this one. It’s a great one to get the team thinking about how they communicate.
Squiggle Birds:
This is a great creative drawing technique demonstrated by Dave Gray – draw a series of random ‘squiggles’ on a piece of paper. Then challenge each member of the team in turn to come up and turn a squiggle into a bird by adding eyes, a beak, feet and a tail.
This is a brilliant exercise for encouraging participants to spot patterns, assign meaning, make connections and get the creative juices flowing in a way that encourages visual and out-of-the-box thinking!
Backwards Pictionary:
A classic with a twist. Split the group into two teams. Write down a series of things to draw, such as animals, landmarks or objects, fold up the bits of paper and mix them up. Choose one member of each team to be the artist and get the rest of the group to choose one description from a hat. Each group must work together to describe the thing on the piece of paper to the artist so that they can draw it – they have 10 minutes to complete the challenge, the team who successfully draw their picture first wins.
This is a good one for team work and getting participants thinking about how they communicate with each other.
Rubber Chicken
This is one of our favourites. You’ll need to divide your workshop team into sub-groups of equal size. Then allocate each team a rubber chicken … but if you want to know more, you’ll have to commission a workshop with us and experience it for yourself!
It’s a brilliant energiser and a lot if fun …
it’s almost worth the price of a day’s workshop to experience it first hand.
The huge number of brilliant ‘connections’ we’ll help you and your team make and the fresh, disruptive ideas we’ll help you generate – will almost be a bonus!
Insightful, Imaginative, Connection-Making, Creative Workshops
If your business or team needs to stimulate creativity and generate breakthrough innovation ideas … we’ll be happy to help.
For more tips for leading group innovation sessions have a look at our e-book ‘xxxxx’ or, even better, get in touch to see how we can help plan a workshop that’ll deliver the solutions you need!
Jo or I would be happy to talk you through the creative tools and techniques that are available … or even help you put a workshop programme in place right now!