How to unleash you and your team’s inner creativity and problem solving ability

Written by Sue Johnson from Superadditivity Limited

When are you at your most creative? Solving problems, product and service innovation, these all come from creative thinking, something that we all seem a bit too busy for at times.

As children, do you remember drawing wild images of transport of the future, how we would live which would be met with great adoration and support.

In the workplace we seem to beat out of people the ability to really dream big and be creative Setting boundaries for what is acceptable, and to go beyond that invites ridicule, put downs with “we tried that before and it didn’t work” or “ that will never work here”

Have you ever played the marshmallow game? in a nutshell you take 20 raw spaghetti strands, a metre of tape, a metre of string, one marshmallow and you have 15 minutes to build the highest free standing tower and place a marshmallow on top. Great fun for a Christmas family party game!

What I find fascinating is the results of tower height, thankfully its no surprise the engineers and architects win the prize, but who is next, CEOs, project managers? Its actually 8-year-old children.

They just keep building, if the tower falls down, they try something else, constantly prototyping, innovating and never giving up. In case you’re interested, groups of CEOs come last, but add an executive assistant and they boost up the rankings.

So, to be creative, to unleash innovative solutions to complex challenges we need psychological safety, quite simply people feel they can speak up, speak freely with no concern or danger that they will be rebuked or judged by anyone – the only way to get the blue sky thinking, wild ideas on the table.

To do that, some practical approaches include:

1 Whitestorming

A great leveller for non-extroverts and activist thinkers.

Define a problem scope question e.g. “how can we grow our business by x per cent in the next 90 days”. Give everyone a stack of post it notes, and the instructions “put one idea on each post it note, and no one is to speak for 3 minutes”.

This allows the more introverted team members, those with reflective, pragmatic and theory thinking styles the time, space and process to capture their thoughts and not be dominated by others.

Capture all the ideas one by one, cluster into themes and then carry out further whitestorming rounds to get deeper clarity/idea generation.

2 Ask the empty chair what they think

It’s as simple as that, in a meeting room literally always ensure there is an empty chair (with a seat at the table) and ask people for ideas about what the empty chair thinks or would do.

This enables people to push boundaries because it’s not them making it, it’s the empty chair!

3 Get outside

I know we tell our children how good fresh air is for them, but actually it is true. Oxygen flow to our brain increases, we are unconsciously stimulated by different surroundings, stress levels reduce, our mood improves, stimulating creativity

4 Use LEGO Serious Play (LSP)

At the core of LSP philosophy is the transformative power of play. Play is not only a recreational activity, it is a profound human process that drives creativity, exploration and innovation.

LSP uses play to create a safe and engaging space where participants can: experiment with ideas, take creative risks and surface new insights, without fear of judgement or failure.

The dual process of thinking with the mind and hands and the physical act of manipulating objects engages neural pathways that support creativity, memory and enable complex problem solving.

And if you are the boss in the room, encourage every idea, always 'Yes and' rather than 'Yes but' and bring ideas to life with a “how could we…” always providing a pathway to the possible…