Techniques to stimulate creativity on your team

Posted on September 19, 2018
Techniques to stimulate creativity on your team

In today’s complex world, there are no quick fixes to problems that face organizations. Solutions can’t necessarily be found with the application of technology, or by falling back on traditional ways of doing things. Obstacles and complications that arise in day-to-day business are solved by people working together to come up with new, creative solutions. But creative thinking and collaborative problem solving does not always happen organically. It can be helped along, however, with frameworks and methodologies to structure interaction and techniques to help guide individuals so that they can tap into their own internal resources.

There are a number of such frameworks available for use. A popular one is Foursight, which involves a four-step methodology for problem solving: Clarify, Ideate, Develop and Implement. The Ideate stage is itself composed of two phases: divergent thinking (where everybody comes up with lots of different ideas), and convergent thinking (when the best ideas are selected and refined).

The following infographic portrays creativity techniques for idea generation during the divergent thinking phase of problem solving. Click the image to download it in PDF format and keep it handy as a reference if you ever need to get your team’s creative problem-solving juices flowing!

This material has been drawn in part from Schulich ExecEd’s upcoming program Masters Certificate in Innovation Leadership (Oct. 15, 2018 – Feb. 15, 2019). Comprising three stand-alone modules of five days each over four months, the program is designed to equip you to lead systematic innovation to consistently develop and implement solutions which add value and deliver results in new ways.