Creativity Exercises
Creativity Exercises
Creativity exercises are activities particularly designed to trigger and improve one's creative thinking and problem-solving skills. They are necessary for people and teams to produce ground-breaking ideas, resist mental obstacles, and cultivate a less biased view on the challenges that come across, be it, on the individual or team level.
What are some effective creativity exercises for individuals?
The efficient creativity has to be constucted of such exercises or training tools as brainstorming, mind mapping, and the random word technique. The first one deals with generating ideas in an open and non-critical way, the second one is a way of conceptually structuring thoughts and the latter one, where the random word is taken as a stimulus to inspire new ideas, is a very good technique for artistc creation. For instance, if the randomly chosen word is 'ocean', one may associate ideas with transparency, depth, or aquatic life in their job.
How can teams benefit from group creativity exercises?
One of the many advantages of group creativity exercises is their ability to foster collaboration and the presence of diverse opinions that can subsequently lead to new brilliant ideas. Some of the strategies such as 'round-robin brainstorming', which requires every participant to suggest their idea one by one, or 'design thinking workshops', which is based on empathy and the idea of iterative prototyping, can be employed in the case of the team needing an injection of creativity. For example, a team dealing with a product design issue could go through the process of design thinking to talk with users and make a fast prototype of the solutions.
What role do constraints play in creativity exercises?
In fact, flexibility can be achieved by addressing in a different way innovative thinking constraints and inspiring forces. One specific example is that the more creativity the individual possesses, the more spontaneous ideas he/she would get. But, on the other hand, individuals who have quantitative ideas are the ones who drive the most creative problem-solving. Another popular game is the one involving the creation of an object using only a predefined number of materials which boosts creativity.
Are there any digital tools that can facilitate creativity exercises?
Absolutely, there are many digital platforms available for the exercises of creativity, for instance, Miro for collaborative brainstorming and mind mapping and IdeaFlip or Trello for the organizing and prioritizing of ideas. These are the platforms that let teams brainstorm together, visualize the ideas and manage their projects better. For instance, on the online whiteboard Miro, the whole group can join a video call and simultaneously create a mind map, thus making the meeting more interesting and generating more ideas.