A Dozen Ways To Help Creativity At Work

Here are a dozen ways to help creativity at work:

1. Discuss and share books and articles on creativity and creative thinking during luncheon discussion groups.

2. Use advanced creativity triggers to shift paradigms and solve problems more creatively.

3. Provide workshops on advanced creativity triggers to help creative thinking.

4. Bring in guest speakers and creativity consultants now and then.

5. Reward creative accomplishment with more time and resources to enjoy being creative again. Foster and stress the daily enjoyment of intrinsic motivation in your team.

6. Celebrate “creativity day” at work occasionally. Wear funny hats. Use everyone’s creativity to decide what to do that day that would motivate their creativity. Wear creative costumes to work on Halloween.

7. Stop criticizing new ideas so soon after they are suggested.

8. Revive the pleasure of knowing you are creative and competent.

9. Stop your habitual automatic NO and quick negative criticism when confronted with new ideas.

10. Mentally resist and immunize yourself against the lures of future extrinsic rewards and instead concentrate on the immediate pleasure and enjoyment when focusing on creativity.

11. Relentlessly squeeze out new alternative solutions constantly.

12. Transform old ideas into new ones: recombine, magnify, distort, reverse, add to, subtract from, reduce, condense, expand, delete, double, digress, manipulate, twist, fantasize, meditate, daydream, connect, assemble, disconnect, reassemble, take apart, free associate, and much more.

13. Incubate a lot looking out the window with your shoes off.

14. Use bizarre trigger-ideas to stimulate new and different ideas.

15. Raise your level of tolerating low conformity for different clothes, ideas, and behaviors in your company.

16. Don’t comment that there are more than a dozen ideas here. Such quick negative criticism over such a trivial issue spoils motivation for creativity.

Want to lead to enhance creativity at work?

Please note items you think are needed in your team or workplace:

___Arrange for workshops on advanced creativity triggers for your work group.

___Establish an incentive program for new, productive ideas based on intrinsic rewards whenever possible.

___Provide enough time to solve problems creatively.

___Devise meetings that will let people free-wheel and flow easily with new ideas.

___Form unusual short-term task forces to allow people to cross-fertilize their thinking to solve problems creatively.

___Set up a creativity room with materials for tinkering and creative thinking.

___Conduct performance reviews that encourage risky creative efforts.

___Reduce fear of failure if someone tries something different.

___Develop separate incentive systems for low and high conformers.

___Hang sheets of large paper outside your office door to keep people openly informed about problems that need creative solutions, and ask for ideas.

___Ask a consultant to observe your work group and suggest ways to help.

___Arrange a team excellence workshop to improve the creative climate and innovative output.

___Rotate people so there are new people working on old problems.

___Hold a meeting where people devise ways of enriching their own jobs creatively.

___Allow people to volunteer for new tasks instead of assigning them.

___Expect yourself and everyone else to solve problems creatively.

___Allow people time for creative thinking by the deadlines you set.

___Introduce advanced creativity triggers to define problems and generate ideas.

___Provide quick resources for testing or implementing new ideas.

___Provide training in selling new ideas.

___Encourage the combining of ideas for greater creativity during problem solving.

These are just a few of the many ways you can help creativity in your work unit. List your own ideas on how you will lead your work group for greater creativity at work.

For other ways to encourage creativity at work, check out my book:

“CREATIVITY TRIGGERS ARE FOR EVERYONE:

How To Use Your Inventiveness To Brighten Your Life.”

CLICK here OR HERE.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

He was a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and founded the Program For Team Excellence And Creativity at the university. He was a ‘Guggenheim Foundation Fellow’ at Stanford University, a ‘Visiting Fellow’ at the ‘Center For Creative Leadership’ in Greensboro, NC, a Visiting Professor at the University Of California at Irvine, and a Visiting Scientist at SRI International in Palo Alto, California.

He was the President of the Creativity College®, a division of Leadership Consulting Services, Inc, and has led numerous creativity meetings and workshops for many companies, including IBM, DuPont, Amoco (now BP) Chemical, Ciba-Geigy, Hoechst-Celanese, Texaco, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Milliken, Federal-Mogul, Thetford, Standard Products, and others.

His book: “Team Creativity At Work I & II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best,” is available: CLICK here OR HERE.

Another book of his: “R&D CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION HANDBOOK: A Practical Guide To Improve Creative Thinking and Innovation Success At Work” is also available. CLICK here OR HERE