.
Fostering
Creativity
Creativity is the ability to generate novel ideas. Creativity isn’t just about
developing innovative products and product features for your customers:
a creative team can identify better ways to execute internal processes, fi nd
better ways to market a product, come up with better options in a nego-
tiation, and solve problems more effectively. Enhancing team creativity is
a goal-oriented, collaborative process that draws on each team member’s
skills, experience, and expertise.
Some people think that creativity only comes from “creative” people.
But it responds to concrete cues, too. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to
lead productive idea-generating sessions and build a creative culture on
your team.
Plan a creative session
You know you need a new idea—maybe you’re trying to come up with a
name for a new product or a feature for an existing one, or to imagine the
218Managing Teams
possibilities for a new business model entirely. Leading a brainstorm ses-
sion isn’t your only option. By planning how you’ll facilitate your creative
session, considering the timing, space, and rules, you can ensure that par-
ticipants are energized, focused, and productive.
Find the right time
Plan the timing for your idea-generation session carefully. Depending on
the scale of what you’re trying to achieve, you may not be able to imagine a
wide range of ideas, winnow down options, and come up with a plan all in
one meeting. So before you send an invite, create an overarching timeline.
When do you need your fresh idea to come to fruition? What milestones
will you achieve in the meantime, and what scheduling constraints do you
need to work around?
Once you have your timeline, do you best to schedule the initial session
far in advance of your fi nal deadline. Many people assume that creative
minds come up with their best ideas when time is tight, but that’s rarely
true. Teams that are pushed to work creatively within an arbitrarily short
time will burn out, and their performance won’t be consistently great.
Creative sessions are mentally demanding, however, so keep each
meeting to thirty minutes. If you decide that your team needs more time,
you can reconvene, but it’s better to stop and schedule a follow-up meeting
than to force your group to keep grinding away unproductively.
Pick a time when people are likely to be at their peak energy, but not
immersed in other distractions. First thing in the morning and late in the
day are not ideal; likewise, avoid scheduling sessions right before a long
break or a major work event. People won’t pay attention.
Set the scene
If possible, choose a location where your team rarely meets in order to
stimulate new thinking. If you need to use your regular space, play around
with the room setup. Instead of sitting around a conference table, position
chairs in clusters.
Ask your team to leave all laptops, tablets, phones, and other devices
behind at their desks. Instead, supply the room with tactile tools beyond
Fostering Creativity219
the traditional whiteboard: huge pieces of paper, small colorful sticky
notes, or a blackboard with colorful chalk. Cover any tables with paper
that can be used for note taking, doodling, or drawing, and provide colored
pens or pencils, markers, crayons, pipe cleaners, even clay. Even if people
don’t end up using these supplies for the work at hand, playing around with
art can help bypass inhibition and ignite the imagination.
Don’t limit these measures to game-day preparations. You can enrich
your team’s everyday physical environment, too. Encourage casual conver-
sations and spontaneous meetings by setting up open seating and planting
a few gathering places around the offi ce: coffee machines, water coolers,
relaxed seating, games. Take note of the places people are already gather-
ing informally and make them more comfortable. Stock these places with
creative tools like whiteboards, markers, fl ip charts, and art supplies, so
that these fortuitous interactions can easily transition to something more
creative.
Establish rules of conduct
In the last chapter, you saw how group norms help teams overcome differ-
ence and mitigate confl ict. That’s especially true when it comes to gener-
ating ideas, where these differences may be most on view and everyone’s
feeling exposed.
To create a sense of safety, set out ground rules at the start of your
meeting. Write them on the whiteboard or where everyone can see them.
You might invite the rest of the group to contribute their ideas, but be fi rm
about the behaviors you expect. If these expectations aren’t already a part
of your team’s ground rules, consider reinforcing them:
•
Respect all members of the group. Ideas and assumptions may be
attacked; individuals may not.
•
Be a good listener. Everyone will have an opportunity to speak
and should actively listen to others.
•
Value varying points of view. Everyone has a right to disagree and
challenge assumptions. Confl icting views are a valuable source of
220Managing Teams
learning and should be welcome when raised at an appropriate
time in the discussion.
• No idea is a bad idea. No idea should be labelled “stupid,” “use-
less,” or any other negative descriptor. No one should be shamed
for participating in the creative process.
These items may already be a part of your team norms and you can
simply remind team members at the start of the session. Be sure to em-
power every one in the group to help you enforce these guidelines by calling
out bad behavior when it happens.
Tools for generating ideas
Successful idea-generating sessions may feel loose and spontaneous, but
they actually have a lot of structure. That’s because our brains all need
some help breaking free from their normal pathways.
Creative ideas arise from divergent thinking, when your team strikes
out in a new thought direction, away from the familiar ways of seeing and
doing things. This type of thinking allows your team to view a problem
from novel perspectives, discover new connections between facts and
events, and explore questions that have never been asked before. The goal
is to quickly generate a wide variety of solutions for a given problem, with-
out prejudging the merit of those options.
You can approach this process in a solution-centric or a problem-
centric way, says innovation expert Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. In a
solution-centric session, the group focuses on generating ideas around a
broadly defi ned issue, such as “How can we improve our marketing plan?”
By focusing on potential, future actions, instead of present conditions, you
keep the group from locking in too tightly on just one point of view. You’ll
generate a handful of highly original ideas, but a lot of nonviable ones, too.
And if you end the session with a long list of options, you may not have the
resources to process which one’s which.
By contrast, a problem-centric session focuses on solving a specifi c,
clearly-defi ned issue. Because these sessions are grounded in making real
Fostering Creativity221
problems better, they generate fewer, higher-quality ideas that are easier
to follow up on. But it’s important to have someone in the room who really
understands the problem, or the conversation can go off the rails.
How do you get a room full of professionals to think freely in this way?
There are several different ways to structure your idea generation:
Brainstorming
This is probably the most well-known option for divergent thinking. The
basic goal is to quickly solicit a lot of ideas from a group, and it’s especially
useful when you want to engage everyone on the team in an informal way.
Especially with a solution-centric approach, you want quantity over qual-
ity, so encourage even the wildest ideas, no matter how strange. You never
know where they may lead. If your team easily comes up with fi ve ideas,
push for twenty.
Help the team along by toggling between these three techniques:
•
Modifying. How could your team members change or adapt the
way they already do things to achieve some different outcome?
Start by asking them to set some priorities: “We want to make
this work process more responsive to changing information” or
“We want to increase our sales conversion rate.” Then ask them to
diagram all the tasks, roles, processes, and protocols involved in
the problem. What margin does the team have for changing each
of these elements? What are all the possible fi xes you could make?
Put the subject-matter experts for each issue in conversation with
other members of the team, and invite nonexperts to explain how
they experience the problem. You might be surprised to hear what
your IT specialist has to say about your sales strategy, or what the
person who sits next to the copier all day has observed about the
way the team prepares for major presentations.
•
Visioning. For a more solution-centric conversation, ask group
members to imagine an ideal solution to the problem or question
before you in great detail and then work backward to fi gure out
how they might achieve it. Start with an open-ended question like,
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