Creativity at Work

Creativity is fun, and it’s functional. Organizations that embrace creativity thinking in innovation and problem solving will not only survive in this changing economy, they are more likely to thrive!

Do you want to your energize and engage your team? Simple creative activities can lift their spirits. Equally as important, these exercises can spark team members to generate new business-friendly ideas. Are you challenged to know how your firm will meet the demands of the triple bottom line comprising of people, planet and profit accountabilities? Are your people tasked with increasing productivity, profitability and progress, or doing more with less?  You can use World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15 – 21 to find ideas to help.

WCIW is a great time to bring your teams’ creativity off the back burner and into the forefront. Here are some straightforward considerations:

• Invite your team to work together to embellish and expand a new "what if" idea you've been considering presenting to your boss.
  
• Hold cross-discipline brainstorming sessions for suggestions to improve efficiencies and communication.
  
• Challenge your employees to come up with more than 100 ideas for how to green their area and your company even more than what is current.
  
• Bring in speakers or facilitators to help expand your perspectives.
  

Having fun while you are doing the above, creates a sense of play. Laughter will lighten the mood and allow for creativity and the release of new ideas.

Do your best to do something new during breaks, over lunch or throughout the day or the week to keep people fresh. By all means, initiate ideas and solve problems. Be warned… once you begin using creative approaches to further your innovation it you might like the results.  Here are some other suggestions for ways to stimulate creative thinking and bring it in as way of life in your organization.

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Recess

Recess gives a chance for businesses of all types to celebrate creativity and fun. Businesses big and small can participate.  Imagine bringing employees down to the streets for lunchtime recess. Just like when you were school kids, you will need supplies like sidewalk chalk, bubble solution and bubble wands (the small jars and regular wands are fine). These supplies are cost-effective, earth friendly, biodegradable, and require no clean up - they wash away with rain.

WCIW Ambassador

Choose volunteers to creatively lead your groups. People who are internal inspirational leaders, responsible for motivating the spirit of everyone! They can spearhead creative projects as well as connect with us, posting pictures of your creative victories! 

Idea Jar

Give your team a topic to brainstorm. Have everyone write down different ideas as potential solutions (even silly ones) and put them in a jar. Everyone then takes a turn by pulling out an idea and then doing their best to make it work.

Tips: Include some silly challenges along with others focused on getting results.

• Write a song about the company
• Walk backwards for the rest of the day
• Speak in one syllable words for the rest of the day
• Solve a company problem
• Come up with an idea to make the company greener
• Come with an idea to make your job better
• Come up with an idea to reduce costs

Admit It. You're Creative.

How well do you know your co-workers...? Did you know that quiet guy in accounting plays in a band at night or that Lucy in IT teaches Salsa dancing or that the boss paints with watercolour on the weekends...? Create a company talent show, gallery or event to which you invite people to share ways in which they are creative outside of work.

Corporate Jam Session

Invite all the employees who play a musical instrument or sing to jam together over lunch.

Corporate Challenge

Challenge your competitors, your suppliers, your divisions to raise the most money for charity. Have your employees come up with new and interesting ways to fundraise for your favourite charity. You will get everyone thinking creatively while helping a good cause

Idea Library

Have everyone bring in their favourite book, get them to share the best idea they got from it and swap.

Job Swap

Let your employees learn more about the company by having them spend a day in another department.

Will lead to greater understanding and appreciation of what the company does and the value their co-workers bring.

Live MindMap

Locate an area with a large amount of wall space and safely cover it with large sheets of paper.  At the centre of the page, post a problem or challenge that the company is currently working on.  Invite everyone in the organization to come up with suggestions for solving it, add to definitions of ideas or build on someone else’s idea. You can use sticky notes with coloured markers (non-toxic or waterbased), or just markers alone.

Rather than gather everyone into a brainstorm, allow people time to think and add their contributions when they are able to and when they have ideas.  Over the course of a day or week you will watch your solution options grow—and create a sense of engagement and ownership.

Creative Buttons

Make wearable quotes and proclaim your creativity to the world! Inspire creativity in others too. Choose slogans that promote positivity and validation. Use  a variety of materials and means to place your slogan on a surface of your choice without causing damage. Give out buttons, stickers or signs to acknowledge each other's creative abilities.

Check out our resources page to download an ‘I am Creative’ icon for your website or Facebook page.

You will need a "surface" - buttons, stickers, pins, hats, shirts, curtains, furniture, boxes, canvas, etc. Always think "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". This project is a good way to reuse items. You will need marking materials - paint and brushes, markers, needle and thread, fabrics, fabric paints, glue and sequins! Be creative!
Suggested messages:

• I am creative!
• Everything is interesting
• Do what you love
• Dream BIG dreams
• INSPIRE
• Look closer

Theme Days

Have every day during Creativity and Innovation Week a different theme
Ideas: Hat Day

• Ugly Tie Day
• Red Day (or any other colour)
• Be Kind to Co-worker Day
• Share an Idea Day
• Volunteer at a Llocal Charity Day

Creative Pot Luck

A different spin on the office pot luck, have everyone bring in a themed dish or a new dish.

Ideas:

• Cookie swap – everyone bakes a different kind of cookie
• International flavours – everyone brings in a dish from a different country or everyone chooses a different dish all from one chosen country

• Traditional dishes: People make and contribute dishes made from a recipe they grew up with

• Experiment – Everyone makes a new dish they have never served

Creative Awards

Incorporate awards for creative thinking at corporate awards ceremonies, and school awards ceremonies. Do you know people who are especially creative in their own way, or who, through their positive attitude, inspire others? You can also make more personal awards and craft an award for someone you know.

Go Green

Come up with creative ways to go green!

Mustache Bomb

Under cover of night, or when no one is around, print out different sizes of moustaches and place them all over every day objects. It's a delightful and funny treat to see little moustaches on every day objects like clocks, staplers, doorknobs, faucets, etc. And you don't have to stop there. Wouldn't that telephone love a bowtie? Wouldn't that mug love a top hat? Surprise everyone in a funny and anthropomorphic way!

You will need a computer and a printer to print out many mustachios, coloured construction paper and scissors to cut them out, and painters tape to stick everything on. Please remember to recycle, or collect and reuse them for another future and improved mustachios bomb!

Weird Challenge

Idea: Provoke and challenge new thinking every day of Creativity & Innovation Week

Find the smallest or zaniest problem your organization faces and challenge people to come up with THE Worst solution.
For example, a small problem could be that people leave their computers on at night and they need to be turned off to conserve energy. A zany problem could be the toilet paper being stolen.

Tips:

• By working together on the problem, contributors take more ownership even if the problem is small or zany.
• By taking more time to define the real problem (the problem hidden within the problem), the solutions become more innovative.
• No matter what idea is presented, ask everyone to build on the idea.
• Involve the senses: What does the problem smell like, taste like, feel like, sound like, what colour would you associate with that it?
• Encourage people to showcase the Ideas on their Office doors or walls.
• Run a poster campaign with different creative solutions every day.
• 
  

Watch how "The Worst" ideas can spawn great ideas. 

Born Free

Idea: Promote workplace freedom. Everyone is creative, we each do it differently.
Some people prefer to come up with lots of ideas and share every one of them, others prefer to share a few select, sound ideas. Some people prefer to work in chaos, others prefer order. It all works, and it's all good. Celebrating the differences allows each one's preference to thrive.

• Ask each person to identify his or her favourite way to work, post it on their door/wall and then encourage them to work that way all week long.

• Ask their co-workers to highlight what's good about that individual's approach.

Idea Coffee Buzz

Idea: Offer free coffee every Friday morning, encourage colleagues to hang around and talk to each other with a specific focus in mind. This helps stimulate conversation and thinking and new ideas inevitably pop up. When ideas do pop up, encourage the group to find ways to support the idea no matter how good or bad it is.

• Over coffee (or water -  its better for your brain) generate a list of 100 ways to compliment an idea.
• Put a whiteboard in a high traffic area and ask for colleagues to contribute ideas. Ask passers-by to take one of the ideas and add something to it to make it better.
• Create some idea recognition cards and send someone a note of recognition for being creative.
• Hold outings (field trips) to where your consumers shop. If you run a retail outlet, work in the store for a day, talk to consumers, be a consumer.
• Run a lunch and learn on creativity.

• During World Creativity and  Innovation Week, have a willing department host a lunch event in the cafeteria with the intention and an easy program for soliciting new ideas from others in the organization during those hours.

The Great Hall of Trust

• Do what the Emergency Task Force does after every project (which often includes shootings, bombings, hostages and generally things that can really go wrong). The entire team enters a "no rank room" to debrief. There, no one has a title, rank, or seniority position. Both positive and negative concerns and ideas for what to do differently and/or better flow. Once the debrief is over, the team exits the room and everyone resumes their rank.

Lunchbox Surprise

Idea: Surprise colleagues with a string quartet over lunch. Sounds, particularly stringed instrumental music, stimulate different parts of the brain and create new pathways for thinking.

• Try some of the ideas shared on this site under "at school".

Daily Ha Ha's for AHA's

Idea: Every day during World Creativity and Innovation Week, ask a different team to provide a chuckle of the day, via email, main bulletin board, intranet postings, etc.

• Make laughing a goal for every meeting.
• Put funny story time or a playful activity on each agenda.

The Grape Debate

Idea: Practice the fine art of debating without attacking and practice building on ideas. Split the group into pairs (not pears) and give each person a grape. The challenge is to debate the merits of each person's grape - all of the attributes that make the person's grape the best grape in the world.

Encourage people to respond to each person's case for their grape in the following ways:

• First, argue loudly and disagree passionately
• Second agree, agree, and agree some more

Each partner has to respond to the ideas put forward in the following order:

1. Positives about the Idea
2. Pluses or Potentials of the idea
3. Concerns expressed in a manner "How might we?"
   

It takes discipline to respond to an idea positively every time, so practice, practice, practice. The benefit? Each time one finds the positive in another person's point of view or idea there is greater opportunity to find new ideas and creative solutions.

Conflict Conflab

Idea: Some people run from conflict and others run towards it. Here's a way to turn everyone in the opposite direction. Ask them to take someone else's point of view. To do this, identify a contentious issue. Ask each person to write down his or her thoughts and ideas about the issue on one piece of paper. Then, collect all of the pieces of paper. Mix them up and redistribute them to the group.

The assignment: Continue the meeting using the point of view of the piece of paper in front of you.

Mistake Party

Celebrate mistakes, really celebrate mistakes.

Break Brains

The brain is a wonderful and it's like a machine yet, if one does the same thing and thinks the same way day in and day out, big ruts form and it becomes tough to pull out of the rut when change occurs. The goal is mental flexibility for generating new pathways in the brain. This takes time and practice.

To achieve this end, encourage people to take time to:

• do things that are new, different or do things differently
• move
• move their feet and their body
• use their hands
• 80% of the brain’s neurons are connected to the hands and therefore when engaging one’s hands in a creative problem solving, the person engages the imaginative mind on a deeper level.
  

Idea
Encourage colleagues to start their day off with different perspectives by taking a different way to work (transit, route, carpooling, time, etc.)

• Host an art class (pottery or drawing)
• Give out stress balls or plastercine to all colleagues to relieve stress and get the creative juices flowing.

Bonus: Myth Buster

Idea
Look up and post all of the myths about creativity on this site under "Resources".

We want to know what you’re up to!

We can encourage workplace creativity and what to celebrate with you.  Send us a note and/or some pictures. If you want to tell others about it, we’ll post it in our newsroom. And you can post pictures on our Creativiki site. Upload your videos to YouTube using the tag 'worldcreativity'