Limitless Creativity

So, once you have all that groundwork laid down and you want to inspire innovation among team members, what creativity practices or tools do you use?

I wish I had more. This is probably an area I’m working on myself, to be honest. But what I’ve tried in the past, some of the activities I’ve done in the past include just open brainstorm exercises. Assume no constraints.
That’s a little bit of a challenge in the environment we’ve been in in the last couple of years, and maybe even in a technology environment to some extent, we tend to sometimes default to a world of, well, in these constraints, what can we do?
But to me, true creativity and innovation comes when you think about no constraints. So really, explicitly giving the team permission to say, assuming you had no constraints, what are some things you would do?
And I think there is a lot of sort of design thinking workshops that we’ve run in the past to really think through, hey, don’t limit yourself to what you may be doing now, or incremental improvements you can make.
Let’s open the doors fully. Let’s think about new perspectives, new lenses. We’ve run exercises where we’ve had groups broken up into smaller teams, and we say you adopt a particular perspective, either of this customer segment or this user type. Put yourself in their shoes, build that empathy, and come up with what you would need to make your experience better as a customer of our product or our company.
What are some things that you don’t see us offering today that you think we should? And putting the team in those shoes, getting those perspectives in, has usually generated some good creativity and some new ideas.
Over the last couple of years. It’s been a bit of a challenge, I think with the world being the way it’s been. It’s been much more of a, hey, we’re burnt out, we’re doing a lot, we’re trying to keep a lot of balls floating in the air.
So, I think there’s definitely been a leaning towards what’s the minimum we need to do. But I’m hoping that over time and as people feel a little bit more comfortable in their world and they feel a little bit more stable with what’s going on outside, that we start having more of these exercises or activities again.