{"id":7429,"date":"2023-08-01T07:17:49","date_gmt":"2023-08-01T07:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/leadership\/4-ways-to-create-more-creative-teams\/"},"modified":"2023-08-01T07:17:49","modified_gmt":"2023-08-01T07:17:49","slug":"4-ways-to-create-more-creative-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=7429","title":{"rendered":"4 Ways To Create More Creative Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"
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While technology skills\u2014and writing good AI prompts\u2014may seem like all-important competencies for career success and sustainability today, creativity may be even more important in our fast-changing business environment. This is true not only for your company\u2019s design team and communications department. As this article in Harvard Business Review puts it, creativity sparks innovation, boosts productivity, allows for adaptation, and fosters growth.<\/p>\n

Also, creativity is fun\u2014especially when a group does it together and gets into a creative flow, says University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill psychologist Keith Sawyer. Flow, a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is that feeling of being fully engaged, excited, \u201cin the zone,\u201d as an article in PositivePsychology.com put it. Group flow is when that great feeling happens with others.<\/p>\n

Sawyer is a leading scientific expert on creativity and the author of 20 books, including Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration<\/em> and Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity<\/em>. He came to creativity studies in a \u2026well . . . creative way. While working on his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he began moonlighting as a pianist in jazz improvisational ensembles. He then joined one of the city\u2019s legendary improv theater groups. He found himself intrigued by the psychology of the group improv dynamic and music and theater, and quickly began exploring how it could be applied to business teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that if you could bottle that improvisational energy, your team could come up with breakthrough ideas,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d seen teams in the consulting world, where I worked before going to grad school. Some were rigid and did not generate new ideas. Others were more fluid and less possessive, and more creative. Those teams were basically improvising.\u201d<\/p>\n

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You can bring improv energy\u2014and the sometimes wild creativity it generates\u2014to work,whether you\u2019re an individual contributor or a leader. Here are 4 ways to get started:<\/p>\n

Aim for the small contribution<\/strong><\/p>\n

To get group flow at work you want to operate like a late-night improv team. Not by drinking beer and joking around on stage but rather by aiming for the small contribution that others can build on. Rather than trying to think of the one, resounding, \u201cah-ha!\u201d insight that everyone will talk about for years, focus on adding a little idea to the mix.<\/p>\n

\u201cI call it \u2018moving it forward.\u2019 Each person takes what came before and adds to it,\u201d says Sawyer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen this is working well, the sum is bigger than the parts. That\u2019s what\u2019s super exciting about groups. That\u2019s where you get breakthrough creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let the bad idea be the enemy of the good <\/strong><\/p>\n

What if someone adds a terrible suggestion to the mix? It\u2019s outside the company\u2019s core offerings, against the brand, not remotely realistic, or not something anyone would ever use. What do you do with that bad idea? Let it generate a good one.<\/p>\n

As a leader, resist the urge to jump in. Instead of saying, \u201cWow, that is really the worst suggestion all day,\u201d wait and see if it ignites a surprising idea in someone else\u2019s mind. Bad ideas can be especially valuable when your team or organization is stuck. \u201cEveryone\u2019s stumped. You bring the team together to come up with solutions. You really need unexpected, surprising things to happen that no one person could think of on their own. That bad idea might be the spark that leads to the good idea later,\u201d says Sawyer.<\/p>\n

Avoid rewarding individual effort <\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s natural to call out a great idea and offer praise for an individual\u2019s stellar contribution, but you would never see this happen in an improv troupe, in part because focusing on one person\u2019s idea stops the group flow. Highlighting an individual\u2019s effort also can cause that person to feel \u201cownership\u201d of it, which makes it very hard to let it go if something better comes along.<\/p>\n

Just as individuals should strive to consider their contributions as building blocks for the whole, so should leaders foster that group-improv attitude\u2014by not interrupting, with compliments or critique. This may sound counterintuitive, but the goal is to have someone else quickly jump in with another thought. Praise from the leader can interrupt the rhythm, and make it harder for others to say something stupid. Don\u2019t think of yourself as the mediator of a group discussion or the director of a team. Rather, be the facilitator. \u201cYou\u2019re not the theater director, standing in front of the stage, ordering everyone around,\u201d says Sawyer. \u201cInstead, step in when it\u2019s not happening. If someone says something and no one responds, then you say, \u2018Okay everyone, can you build on that?\u2019 If you\u2019ve done your job right, you won\u2019t have to say anything,\u201d says Sawyer. \u201cOther people will already be moving it forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lot of companies have incentive systems that paradoxically squelch contribution, says Sawyer. \u201cRewarding that person turns out to be a horrible idea because successful new products come from lots and lots of people. If you incentivize people to come up with their own ideas, then you aren\u2019t incentivizing them to work together and to fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Foster collaboration as a culture<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can foster more of an improv spirit in your company. \u201cIf someone comes to you with a great idea, circulate it around the organization. The more it flows around, the more likely it is that more ideas will emerge collectively from the organization,\u201d says Sawyer.<\/p>\n

As a leader, you can put in place improv-promoting systems. \u201cA lot of innovative companies are doing this, fostering this exchange,\u201d says Sawyer. \u201cW. L. Gore, known for Gore-Tex waterproof fabric, is a big manufacturing company with lots of patents and products\u2014dental floss, the best-selling guitar strings in the country, and mountain bike cables. They have incentive systems that incentivize coming together. They don\u2019t have individual profit-sharing, which kills collaboration because people want to take credit for the idea. Everyone keeps ownership of their own ideas and doesn\u2019t share. And then they stick with their own ideas that aren\u2019t that great. Nobody comes up with a successful product all by themselves. You\u2019ve got to get people to come together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Practice <\/strong><\/p>\n

While improv theater is based on \u201coff-the-cuff,\u201d immediate reactions, the skill to think quickly with a team takes practice. \u201cImprovisational groups rehearse all the time,\u201d says Sawyer. \u201cPeople used to joke about this when I\u2019d go off to my improv rehearsal. They\u2019d be like, \u2018Why do you need to rehearse? It\u2019s improv.<\/em>\u2019 But improv is a muscle, just like anything else. It\u2019s a skill set. You have to work on it like anything else. As a team member and as a leader, you want to practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a leader, you can promote practicing. \u201cThe most innovative organizations do have systems in place where people are creative every week. Gore has a policy where every employee spends four hours a week not doing anything except something potentially radical, new, and different that the company could potentially do with its resources, and that could make money at some point. It could be their own idea. They could join someone else and work on their idea. These teams kind-of form spontaneously, but the manager doesn\u2019t have to give approval. You\u2019re just doing whatever seems like it might be useful. It’s like sacred; you can\u2019t overwork somebody so they end up using their four hours on the project. If you fail, you don\u2019t get dinged.\u201d<\/p>\n

The guitar strings that W.L. Gore manufactures, called Elixir Strings and famous among musicians for their patented fluoropolymer coating, came about this way, says Sawyer. \u201cMost of the time, nothing great happens. But every once in a while, something breakthrough comes out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While technology skills\u2014and writing good AI prompts\u2014may seem like all-important competencies for career success and sustainability today, creativity may be even more important in our fast-changing business environment. This is true not only for your company\u2019s design team and communications department. As this article in Harvard Business Review puts it, creativity sparks innovation, boosts productivity, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7429","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-leadership"},"yoast_head":"\n4 Ways To Create More Creative Teams | Brandiary<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"While technology skills\u2014and writing good AI prompts\u2014may seem like all-important competencies for career success and sustainability today, creativity may\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=7429\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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