When it comes to producing innovative ideas, it is not easy, it is a job to always be churning them out. When you have sessions with your team, this can be extremely helpful. You are going to learn that some sessions are better than others.
When you feel like you are not coming away with anything useful sometimes it can feel like you are wasting time. Here are a few tricks to make sure that the sessions are always productive.
Have Your Ideas First
When you have a session you want to make sure that everyone who is in the room is going to feel comfortable sharing all the ideas. What that means is that they need to feel comfortable sharing them and many of them are not going to be impressive. You need to be able to share the ideas and know that you have productivity happening in the groups.
One of the best things to do is to spend the first 10 minutes doing brainstorming and that will mean that when you are getting started you will be able to toss out the bad ideas. In a recent study, it was found that it takes about four thousand bad ideas to get to one gem. What that means is that there are going to be some throw aways and you are going to be able to have some laughs as well as a team.
Always Break Down Ideas Together
One of the best things that you can do is to take apart an idea and make sure that you have a theme. What that means is that you can have a perspective that will allow you to have a broader perspective and make sure that you have each person in the room sharing their ideas with each other. After that you can then trade all the papers with the numbers on them and from there you can get innovative ideas.
Have Word Games as a Team
When it comes to words, they are one of the best ways to ensure that you are moving to latest ideas. You need to get an idea and then put it into some out of the box thinking with the team. One fun thing to do is to take a word and have a word brainstorming session.
In that time, you allow everyone to think of what that word means and what is associated with it. Then you take that idea and come up with as many similar words as you can to make sure that whatever project you are working on is clear. In addition to this, you can also have a storm on a whiteboard, and you can then take this information and share it with the team after the meeting.
Have a Mood Board
This is a wonderful way to ensure that you can spark innovative ideas. When people look at the board, they will get innovative ideas. This is one of the more unconventional ways of learning.
What this also means is that there are many ways to be able to use the prompts in brainstorming and this one is great for producing new concepts all together. When you are working on a board, you will see that it is a board of images as well as textures that are focused on a particular topic. You will want to use this as a way of branch off the existing topic.
Improv
Games with improv are one of the best ways to ensure that you can have a great environment that allows people to share and to really feel free with one another. When you have a team that engages in these kinds of activities you will be amazed at the amount of creativity that they are able to share and the energy that happens between them.
Doodle
When you are working with creative insight, you will see that you can increase attention and the span of long- and short-term memory by doodling. There are many sessions out there that are based on reading and taking, but when you are doodling it helps people to get out of the mindset of being stuck in a box and that means that people are going to connect to the information differently.
Change Your Environment
When it comes to making changes in where you are, you will see it is more than just a change of pace. It can be important for the way that your brain is working. When you are in a new place, it makes s new connections.
Where you are having your sessions could have an impact on the quality of the results you are producing. You want to make sure that you are not using the same regular meeting room if you can. You want to find as many ways as you can to allow people to engage creatively.
Never Have Too Many People
Jeff Bezos has a noticeably clear rule when it come to sessions like this. He never allows there to be more people in a session than can be fed by two pizzas. That also makes sense.
We have all had a pizza on our own before, but that is 6-20 people. When you are working with a group that is that side you will see that it is more productive.
It can become exceedingly difficult to have all those people with too many ideas at the same time. When you have a group of ten or fewer you are going to get the best chance to share ideas and not get too off topic.
Take this list of ideas and see which work for you and which would be better for others. You can also use them in tandem and see how you can improve your overall situation as a group. This is meant to inspire creativity and help you be more productive.
