Keeping the Creative Spark Alive

One of the exercises that I have done with some larger teams to promote and push creativity—you know how you get swag bags from random events, and everything in it is just junk, and you never use it? Save them.

Really?

Yes, save them. And you can even do this remotely. But I’ve done this exercise where you just dump a whole bunch of stuff, random stuff on the table, and everyone has to pick something and be inspired by that object to come up with a solution to a problem you’re trying to solve. It sounds very weird, but it pushes you to say, this is the problem that we have with our client, or this is something that we’re thinking about we have to solve. And I have a paperclip. How do I? I’m thinking of the paper clip. It pushes your mind to incorporate that into a solution, and it forces you to be innovative in ways that it wasn’t before.
It’s also very interesting what people can come up with, or just ask people to bring a random item, and push your team, everyone picks one thing, and you come up with a solution to the problem. And look, are there going to be some awful ideas? Yes, but it doesn't have to be a good one, right? I tell my team, that’s a bad idea, we’ve got 99 more before we’re bound to hit a good one, right?