5 Ways to Improve Your Team’s Creativity

Without breaking the budget or increasing meeting time

With creativity set to be the number one demanded skill by 2027, here’s a few simple ways to invite more creativity into your team and culture.   

1. Add creativity to the agenda 

The biggest thing with bringing creativity into your team is making it part of the normal conversation.  Creativity isn’t something reserved for brainstorming sessions or strategy workshops.  Creative thinking is an everyday thing.  Try adding an agenda item to your regular team meeting to discuss creative successes. With the acceleration of AI into mainstream work and the associated trial and error, a potential place to start is to share any creative AI successes.  Innovation happens when creativity succeeds.  

2. Option Z 

Introduce Option Z to your problem-solving discussions.  Take a small diversion from the standard route of fleshing out the sensible options for consideration and challenge your team to come up with an Option Z that takes a completely different view of things.  Pick a persona and try walking in their shoes.  What options would they consider?  It doesn’t have to be a persona directly related to your business. It could be a celebrity, an historical figure, an alien... Imagination plays a large role in creativity and walking in someone else’s shoes can help to create and connect the dots for new and unusual ideas.  

3. Do it daily

As the Maya Angelou said, “you can’t use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have”. If you want to be more creative, you need to practice and there’s a wealth of research to support this.  But where to find the time?  If your team can individually find 3 minutes a day, sign up to Creatomica Daily and access a different 3-minute creativity challenge each day.  Small amounts of creativity each day adds up to a load of practice over a week, a month, a year.  

4. Walk

Science shows that we are more creative when we walk.  It doesn’t even need to be outside, walking inside works just as well.  From a neurochemical perspective, we’re generally more relaxed when we’re walking, and this is thought to aid executive function.  This is obviously not going to work for every meeting but if you’re discussing a problem and exploring possible options, a walking meeting will help with creative thinking. 

5. Let it Incubate 

Everyone knows that the best ideas come in the shower and study published in 2019 of professional writers and physicists and when and where they had their most creative ideas over a two-week period, demonstrated that approximately 20 per cent of their most significant ideas occurred when they were thinking about something unrelated to the creative idea. When we do moderately challenging tasks in autopilot, our mind wanders. And when our mind wanders creativity happens.  If your team has a particularly tough problem to solve, do the groundwork to get the discussion to the point where the problem has been clearly articulated and then let it sit. Ask the team to keep it ticking over and reconvene in a day and see if the shower effect has generated some creative ideas.