Five Ways to Jumpstart Your Organization’s Creative Process

Ideas make money, and thus we should make time for ideas. As valuable as brainstorming is, most of us don’t have the luxury of spending hour after hour sitting in meetings scrawling ideas down on scratchpads and whiteboards. Although we should always be in a creative, big-picture mindset on our own time, group brainstorming is extremely helpful and we should spend our creative time together in the most efficient manner possible.

Here are five ways you can jumpstart your organization’s creative process in order to get the best return on your team’s time:

1. Be clear about your objectives – Spouting out ideas purposelessly accomplishes little. You need to set some clear direction before you can direct your people’s energy towards some innovative end. Goals don’t have to be specific, but they need to be unambiguous. Here are some examples: develop new ways to improve a product, develop new concepts for future products, develop ideas for making customer communication more engaging, etc…

2. Be inclusive – Everyone has something different (and potentially valuable) to bring to the table. Should you invite the whole company into one meeting to brainstorm ideas for a new marketing campaign? Probably not, but it would be a good idea to invite some people from sales and some from the product research team who could offer perspectives about what current and potential customers are looking for.

3. Establish clear boundaries – The creative process involves two parts: the ideas people come up with as a group and the ideas people come up with while they are working on implementing the idea formed during the group meeting. Establish a clear boundary between those two things – when you’re discussing a new marketing campaign, the details of what graphics you’re going to use aren’t relevant until after you’ve agreed on a general concept for the campaign.

4. Organize your ideas – In addition to simply creating ideas, it’s important to organize and categorize them. For this there is no better tool than a mind map. I did a post a year ago which shows you step-by-step how to use mind maps to organize your ideas. The purpose of organizing your ideas is to take everything you produce during a brainstorming session and to start prioritizing and grouping everything so you can actually begin developing your ideas into products. Organizing your ideas also helps you construct a clearer, bigger picture from the sum of all of the component parts that you and your team develop during the brainstorming process. It’s a very simple exercise that gives a big return on investment.

5. Give your co-workers ownership of their work – Ideally you want your co-workers to extend the creative process from the brainstorming meeting all the way back to their desks, and the best way to do that is to give them ownership over their work. When people feel like they have a certain freedom to freely make decisions and make mistakes, they are enabled to try new things and new ideas.

Did I leave any out? Are there any other major ways to improve productivity? Let us know in the comments!

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