Council Post: Three Creativity Exercises To Spark Employee Innovation

The democratization of innovation over the last decade — as the organizational concept of innovation has spread from top-down to shared ownership — is mirrored in a growing body of academic research exploring the impact of individual and team-based creativity on macro-level innovation initiatives. One oft-cited study published in the Journal of Management frames the relationship like this: “Considerable evidence now suggests that employee creativity can substantially contribute to organizational innovation, effectiveness and survival.”

But there are a few mindset challenges many organizations face.

First, I find that many business leaders view innovation like they view creativity — as a realm only accessible for a select few. This fixed mindset disregards the microelements of innovation and equates it with breakthrough discoveries and industry-disrupting ideas. This belief creates distance between the potential innovator and innovation, and I’ve worked with creatives long enough to know that sometimes these barriers are purposely erected; if you convince yourself that you’re incapable of being creative or innovative, then there’s no pressure to be either.

Second, some leaders think innovation and idea generation are synonymous. In this light, ideas become the default answer for seemingly every organizational challenge:

• New offerings from competitors are tightening the market. We need more ideas.

• A marketing campaign didn’t resonate with its targeted audience. More ideas, please.

The truth, however, lies closer to what David Burkus, author of The Myths of Creativity, wrote (subscription required): “In most organizations, innovation isn’t hampered by a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of noticing the good ideas already there.”

An organization’s inability to capture creative ideas that already exist is just one element to the innovation puzzle. Today’s business leaders must also reimagine innovation by taking its microelements seriously and finding new ways to empower and incentivize employees. Here are a few creativity exercises capable of kickstarting employee innovation.

The IGA Framework

The inefficiencies, glue, alternatives (IGA) framework involves three five-minute sessions of sitting with your eyes closed. For this exercise, you’ll need a piece of paper folded into three equal parts, a pen or pencil, a timer, and a comfortable, quiet place to sit. Here’s the three-step approach for recognizing challenges, understanding why they exist and discovering creative solutions.

1. Choose a recent project you’ve worked on, either completed or in progress. Then set a timer for five minutes, close your eyes and reflect on the most notable inefficiencies that arose during this project. As you discover them, open your eyes and write them in the “inefficiencies” section. Ideally, you’ll have more than one.

2. Choose one inefficiency to address. Before setting the timer for another five minutes, set your intention: Your goal is to understand the glue that held this inefficiency together. A few questions to ask yourself could be:

• Why did this inefficiency persist?

• Has it happened before?

• What was my role in it?

Try not to let blame dominate this session. The goal is to pinpoint the glue so we can melt it (find a suitable solution). Write a few relevant notes in the “glue” section.

3. In this final five minutes, you’ll brainstorm potential solutions to the inefficiency, capturing what comes to you in the “alternatives” section.

Schedule Walking Meetings

Steve Jobs was renowned for taking walking meetings, and research from Stanford University published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition backs this idea up. Walking, as opposed to sitting, could increase creative output by as much as 60%. And you need not be deep in a beautiful forest to experience the benefits. The study found that creative inspiration increased from both indoor and outdoor walking.

Schedule walking meetings in advance, and strive to use them when creativity has a place (likely not during an all-hands meeting when the goal is to share what you’re working on).

The Six Stage Ideation Flow

Idea generation is a critical component of innovation initiatives, but great ideas can easily slip through the cracks or not leverage the collective genius of teams. As my former innovation professor often said, “Enlightened trial and error of the good creative team always beats the lone genius.” Here are some brief notes about how to implement the six stages.

1. Establish your why.

Think of this as your ideation flow mission statement — your compass to ensure that each step of your ideation flow is moving in the right direction. Determine the why of your overall goal, and explain, using as many specifics as possible, why you believe creativity is vital to accomplishing it.

2. Assemble a team.

Think beyond your department. Imagine that you could choose any of your colleagues to build a dream team of thinkers for this ideation flow. Then begin to build the allies you need. Research dating back to 1970, reported on by Fortune, suggests that the most productive teams have around five members.

3. Conduct research.

This includes interviewing internal subject matter experts, gathering insights from internal and external data, and generally building a body of evidence to help you determine if your goal aligns with industry trends or if it should be tweaked/reconsidered.

4. Generate ideas.

There are a variety of ways to do this, but core to them all is creating group psychological safety so that all participants feel comfortable bringing their most creative ideas to the table.

5. Rank ideas.

Not all ideas are created equal, so rank them based on which could have the most significant organizational impact. It can be helpful to have an independent party review these rankings. This is also a good time to reconnect with the subject matter experts you interviewed.

6. Strategize.

Once your team decides which idea to pursue, run the idea back through the stages.

• Does its why still hold weight?

• Is the team you built to discover it the team that should bring it to life?

• Do you need to go deeper in your research?

• Are there related ideas to consider?

• How would you rank those ideas?

If you’ve made it here, move from ideation to action.