Osborne has also said that the phenomenon known as ‘groupthink’ is one of the reasons that the thefts went undetected for so long. He is suggesting that the whole group could not fathom or believe that the objects were vulnerable to theft, nor that anyone working at the museum would decide to steal them.

Whilst this is an extreme and shocking example of possible groupthink, it’s something that as a brainstorm facilitator I see often. People will defer to hierarchy or the so-called HIPPO in the room (highest paid person’s opinion).

“HiPPOs are leaders who are so self-assured that they need neither other’s ideas nor data to affirm the correctness of their instinctual beliefs. Relying on their experience and smarts, they are quick to shoot down contradictory positions and dismissive of underling’s input.”

Forbes Magazine

What is Groupthink?

It’s a phenomenon that occurs when a group of people make irrational or poor decisions because they are reluctant to challenge each other’s opinions or ideas. It is often caused by a strong desire for conformity and harmony within the group.

“Groupthink” was first introduced in Psychology Today by the psychologist Irving Janis. It can have a devastating impact on innovation. When people are afraid to speak up or disagree with others, they are less likely to share their most creative and innovative ideas. This can lead to a less diverse and less effective brainstorming session, and ultimately to poorer decision-making.

Here are some tips for avoiding groupthink:

• Create a safe and supportive environment: Encourage everyone to feel comfortable sharing their ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem.
• Set ground rules: Establish some ground rules for the brainstorming session, such as no criticism or judgment, and everyone gets a chance to speak. We like IDEO’s 7 rules for divergent thinking:
  • Defer judgement
  • Encourage wild ideas
  • Build on others’ ideas
  • Stay on topic
  • One conversation at a time
  • Be visual
  • Go for quantity.
• Use anonymous idea submission: If people are still hesitant to share their ideas, consider using an anonymous idea submission process. This can help to reduce the pressure of conformity and encourage people to share their most creative ideas.
• Have a facilitator: A facilitator can help to keep the brainstorming session on track and ensure that everyone has a chance to participate.
• Take breaks: Take short breaks throughout the brainstorming session to give people a chance to recharge and come up with new ideas.
• Break the group up: We like the process 1,2,4 all – work alone, in pairs, pair up with another pair then share back to the group.
• Use asynchronous tools: We love using MIRO and MURAL whiteboarding tools to allow people to share their ideas, anonymously or otherwise, in their own time without being unduly influenced by others.
• Share the criteria for decision-making: Make it clear that this is an objective process.
• Try a pre-mortem: When you’ve chosen a route, think about all the possible things that could go wrong using the pre-mortem technique (before the patient/idea dies a death, not after). See our blog on the pre-mortem here.

By following these tips, you can help to create a brainstorming environment that is more conducive to creativity and innovative thinking. When people are afraid to speak up or disagree with others, they are less likely to share their most creative ideas. This can lead to a less diverse and less effective brainstorming session, and ultimately to poorer decision-making.

The post Groupthink: The Silent Killer of Innovation first appeared on Now Go Create.

Any of this sound familiar? When we run our creative thinking training we often hear from clients that their brainstorming or creative process is not working brilliantly. 

And recently I was a guest on the the Highly Relational podcast, with Robert Digings, a former attendee on one our courses. He asked me to talk about how to build a high performing creative team. 

I talked about one of my favourite and easily accessible models to think about how you can help your team to develop and generate better ideas in a brainstorm, or any other setting. 

You can’t expect a new team to perform exceptionally from the very outset. Team formation takes time, and usually follows some easily recognizable stages, as the team journeys from being a group of strangers to becoming a united team with a common goal. 

I’ve written about the topic of psychological safety before, and it’s a key part of high performing teams, and building collaborative teams who trust each other and feel confident to share their ideas. 

In order to nurture your creative team – actually, any team – so that it becomes a high-performing group, a whole load of magic (and science) needs to happen en route. 

If you facilitate creative sessions or workshops of any kind then it’s good to understand a bit about team dynamics and how to successfully navigate everyone through the different stages of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.

A quick run-through the Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing process

Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing are what psychologist Bruce Tuckman identified in the 60s as the ‘developmental sequence in small groups.’

Here’s each stage at a glance:

What’s the forming stage?

Remember those awkward first-time encounters between strangers in a new team group or in a group of people brought together for a meeting or a brainstorm? This is part of the forming stage where each person isn’t quite sure of where they fit in or what the other people in the team are really like.

They will all have different agendas, too. Some will be totally up for it, while others will be reluctant participants. Who will emerge as a team leader? Who will tap into a vat of extra strength when the going gets tough?

What’s the storming stage?

This is the phase that many teams never quite get out of – especially if they don’t meet regularly. It’s when everybody is jockeying for position, and people often struggle with each other’s boundaries or working style.

If left unchecked, this kind of team can derail the whole process or a brainstorm as participants question the value of the brief, the team leader and the mission as a whole. Getting through this phase is an essential part of the process. If you have to facilitate at either of the above stages it can be challenging, as essentially you’re thrown into the mix too! 

When do we know when we’re norming?

As the name suggests, this is where things normalise somewhat. People get into the rhythm of the group, they find their place, and a certain kind of harmony tends to develop.

With your team members more comfortable around each other, they become better at challenging problems, asking for help, receiving and giving feedback and so on. Trust is key and people feel confident and safe about sharing their ideas. It’s not about groupthink though; where the group feel the need to get to a consensus and harmony, it’s about feeling you can debate, discuss and challenge without feeling threated. 

Now we’re performing

Obviously, reaching this stage doesn’t happen overnight, but a functioning team that has been through the norming phase usually passes onto the Performing phase – with the right guidance.

Your goal isn’t necessarily to get the team from Forming to Performing in the shortest possible time; the trick is to get them to the Performing stage at all!

After all, we’ve all been in groups of co-workers who simply never gelled, and conflict remained a constant issue. I’ve been part of working groups where the thinking was siloed and people did not want to listen or debate ‘their way or the highway.’ 

How you can use the Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing method to accelerate your creative thinking

Now that you know the four stages, it shouldn’t be too hard to identify where your group or team is at.

If it is one of the first three, your move should be to try and shift them to the next stage. 

How do you do this? You can address:

Build trust: If you do one thing, do this. Set ground rules for engagement and make it clear through your own words and actions if you’re facilitating that everyone’s voice is equal. Make sure that team conflict does not go unresolved.

The dreaded ice-breaker – whatever works for you here as you’ll set the tone as the facilitator – help people to get to know each other better. Personal favourites:

• What’s your theme tune today?
• What did you want to do for a job when you were little?
• Tell a story one sentence at a time (everyone says one line)

Individual performance. One-to-one feedback with participants could help to nudge them in the right direction.

Your own leadership or facilitation style. Are you playing the role of a capable captain – or a foundering junior officer steering the ship onto the rocks? Do you actively listen and offer people different ways to participate? Are you finding ways to bring the introverts as well as the extraverts along with you?

So if you want to get to better ideas and improve your facilitation skills, consider the model and see where you can add something to build your skills. Let me know how you get on!

You can listen to my contribution to the Highly Relational podcast here.

And if you want help with your creative thinking at any stage of the process, we have a brainstorm facilitation course for that. Drop me a line for more info.

Photo by Gary Butterfield on Unsplash

The post Why ‘Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing’ is your secret weapon to better brainstorms  first appeared on Now Go Create.

There’s this horrible sounding phrase, ‘leakage’, which means that we ‘leak’ all kinds of information about ourselves without saying a word.

Things like our posture, eye contact, head movements, the position of our shoulders, as well as the tone of our voice, energy, mood and engagement with the material.

When it comes to creativity and brainstorming, I think about facilitation as having mental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects to it. It’s about getting yourself into a ‘great state to create.’ Sometimes it’s easier to get into than others. Today, it took work.

A baton for brainstorm facilitation

To help me get there, I used the metaphor of conducting an orchestra. By the end, when I hoped I had gained their trust, I asked them to grab a ‘baton’ and conduct the hell out of the William Tell Overture (camera off). I did it too, and got a rush of adrenalin from the exercise.

Quite risky, then. But also high reward – as they seemed to enjoy it too. And the physical movement perked everyone up. I also use Boston Philharmonic conductor, Benjamin Zander, and his wife Rosamund’s book, The Art Of Possibility as a reference for this training, so it didn’t come completely out of nowhere 😉

Zander’s philosophy is that ‘it’s all invented’. So we might as well invent things the way we want them.

“What assumption am I making,
That I’m not aware I’m making,
That gives me what I see?”
What might I now invent,
That I haven’t yet invented,
That would give me other choices?”
Benjamin Zander

Cameras off meant that anyone who didn’t want to didn’t have to play if they didn’t want to. Thanks to all for going with it!

Why tools are so important for creative thinking

For my own part, it had been a week of hiccups for all sorts of reasons, so I was really pleased to be able to deliver a successful session when, a short time earlier, I just wasn’t feeling it. We all need a shot in the arm sometimes, and I’m so grateful that I have such a large bag of creativity tools to lean on.

If you want to find out more about the art of meeting and brainstorm facilitation, sign up for one of our courses. I’ll be ‘feeling it’ well in advance, next time: I promise!

Picture credit: Pixabay artesitalia

The post Like herding cats: the art of brainstorm facilitation first appeared on Now Go Create.

There’s always lots of discussion about the good, the bad and the ugly of a group brainstorm when we work with organisations to up the ante on their creative output.

Most businesses can benefit from problem-solving training of some kind, and while brainstorming is not my go-to tool when helping them to improve their creative thinking, it’s a starting point that most people are familiar with.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we expect far too much from a single meeting (or ‘brainstorm’). I think we need to re-imagine the process or at least the outcomes.

Why badly-run meetings stifle creativity

I’m no fan of a badly-run meeting – which effectively a crappy brainstorm is. You’ll know if it’s badly run if there’s:

• No agenda
• No stimulus
• A poor problem statement
• No insights
• Zero prep
• No facilitation
• Loads of assumptions, judgements, distractions and silo-protecting.

And that’s to name but a few. If it’s badly-run, then 99 times out of 100 the creative output in a brainstorming session will be weak. You don’t need a PhD to see why: it’s like asking why a team of under-prepared, bored automotive designers with no actual brief came up with a lousy car.

Call the idea-generating process whatever you like, but in my experience, brilliant creative and innovative ideas are rarely (if ever) the result of one person’s work start to finish. So we need to actively listen, to facilitate, to build on nascent thoughts and make room for discussion, debate and dissent – amongst other things.

This ‘creative abrasion’ is what aids the best ideas.

It’s not about ‘there’s no such thing as a bad idea’. Of course there are loads of terrible ideas in meetings or brainstorms or conversations. It’s what we do with them that counts – and also how we react. If we were scriptwriters, we’d just call it all material until we decided what to do with it.

How to brainstorm? It takes a whole team

With Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity coming up next week, a glance at a single entry will often show up to 20 people named as contributors. Academics and scientists, meanwhile, will cite many others in their own work.

Maybe the idea came from one person, and is (hopefully) based on an insight or data from another person or team. Then the fledgeling idea goes through multiple iterations and edits before it sees the light of day.

This HBR article is not new, but it’s still relevant here. It shows how the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety — the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake.

Risky ideas need freedom to breathe

Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off. These are just the types of behaviour that lead to market breakthroughs.

Amy Edmonson of Harvard has written extensively about this and created an assessment – the Team Learning and Psychological Safety Survey is a 24-item measure. Team psychological safety, defined as the extent to which the team views the social climate as conducive to interpersonal risk, is assessed.

Also measured are:

• Internal team learning behaviours, including the extent to which team members engage in behaviours designed to monitor progress and performance against goals and behaviours designed to test assumptions and create new possibilities
• External team learning behaviours, defined as the extent to which team members engage in behaviours designed to obtain information and feedback from others in the organisation or from customers.

The respondent must also provide information on team learning outcomes, which are defined as the learning benefits for individual team members as a result of working on this team.

Watch her short TED talk here

So when brainstorming, start with building trust and the ideas will follow.

If you’re interested in developing your creative abilities and problem-solving skills check out our latest courses.

Image by Anemone123 from Pixabay

The post How to brainstorm – ideas start with trust first appeared on Now Go Create.

Creative icebreakers are just the thing for starting a problem solving or brainstorming session. We use them all them time during our creativity training courses, as they help people to get in the right mood and loosen up.

If you’re wondering about the image above this post, it’s because we originally started it with the line: How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice, boom boom.

Sorry about that 🙂

The fact is, there’s more to a good icebreaker than pointing to a random person and saying ‘Tell us a joke!’ (in fact, definitely don’t do this). A good creative icebreaker will cajole, include… and get everyone feeling a sense of kinship with their fellow idea-makers. Here are six of our favourites…

1 The ‘Wouldn’t It Be Amazing If…?’ Icebreaker

Ask everyone to paint a vision of the future for your project with this ambition-laden sentence. Complete the phrase….

‘Wouldn’t It Be Amazing If…?’

2 The Cube Icebreaker

One of the oldest thought experiments is The Cube. This game, popular in the coffeehouses of Eastern Europe, is reputed to be of ancient Sufi origin.

The game involves participants imagining a desert landscape with five specific elements. According to a current book about this game, your answer is a “soulprint” that provides a profile of your inner life. You can interpret the answer to discover unconscious truths about how you define yourself.

If you are intrigued, you can get detailed directions and interpretations from this book written by Annie Gottlieb – The Cube: Keep the Secret

3 The Movie Pitch Icebreaker

Split people into small groups or pairs and ask the group come up with a movie they want to make. Everyone should have a short elevator movie pitch prepared within 10 minutes. Let everyone make their pitch, and then have attendees vote on which idea deserves “funding”.

4 The Created-by-you-for-you Icebreaker

Have each meeting attendee bring or make up their favourite icebreaker. This “icebreaker” can be a funny joke, a quote, a phrase, an activity – anything at all. It works because it removes the “Why are you making me do this?” factor. Everything employees do will be self-inflicted.

5 The Visual Icebreaker

One of our favourite creative icebreakers is this quick exercise. Dubbed “The Doodle Dandy,” it was found on How Design and it works like this…

You get a stack of simple “starter” scribbles (just a few swirls and lines on bits of paper) and a stack of short phrases. And the goal is to draw a doodle (starting with the existing swirls and lines)  on the paper.

Here is their sample phrase list (they also encourage you to come up with your own, which could be tied by you into the theme for the meeting)

• “Happy as a clam”
• “I can’t get no satisfaction”
• “Where in the world?”
• “A hard day’s night”
• “Human nature”
• “The art of noise”
• “Here comes trouble”

6 The go-for quantity Icebreaker

This is IDEo’s 30 circles exercise mentioned in Tim Brown’s 2008 TEDTalk Tales of Creativity in Play  

The post 6 creative icebreakers that won’t make you cringe first appeared on Now Go Create.

My team and I have now run thousands of brainstorms, workshops and training sessions (that’s Now Go Create’s uber facilitator Anahita in the photo above, facilitating a session with Google). We’ve also spent many hours designing and re-designing our courses to create and deliver exciting, impactful, useful sessions.

Our most obvious role, is that of facilitator in the brainstorm or meeting on the day: we’re the ones who make sure the problem-solving session is well structured and runs smoothly. But what many people don’t realise is that the art of creative workshop facilitation requires a whole bunch of in-demand skills – good prep being one of them.

There’s more though. So we thought we’d share some of our brainstorm facilitation go-to tools, tips and tricks right here.

Start with the free brainstorm template, adapt it as you need to, and then use that alongside the tips here. Flex it to your own style and project needs.

The truth about creative workshop facilitation

As I’m sure you already know, there is no single right or wrong way to run a creative session. But we can help to provide some structure and ideas that you can pilfer.

By the way: do you know the definition of facilitation? It means ‘to make easy’. We also think of it like this:

• It’s a process that assists participants in meetings to work to their objectives and achieve their goals
• It focuses on the participants, not the facilitator.
• It’s a way to create a safe space for everyone to express their thoughts (see our blog on psychological safety).

What we’ve learned:

1. There is no one-size fits all. BUT the one thing that will never fail you is prep. What you do outside of the room matters as much as what happens in the room. And by room we mean real or virtual.
2. What is the problem? Write it down as simply as you can. Then write it 5 x differently – change the verb (from attract to lure to encourage to enable, for example). Ask everyone to write their ‘Twitter’ brief – say it in 280 characters or less. What’s life or death? Here’s some more about briefing.
3. Explain it to your gran – get rid of jargon.
4. Ensure you have stimuli – customer insights, imagery, the results of any research or product information and your chosen creativity tools.
5. Break the group into pairs or trios. You don’t have to involve the whole group all the time.
6. Allow time for generating ideas and separately for evaluating them.
7. If it all goes Pete Tong, take a 5 minute comfort break and regroup.
8. Make sure you have prepped and resourced yourself. Ask if you have you done everything you can to prepare yourself, mind, body and spirit so that you can be fully present and engaged. And can create a playful atmosphere and environment for creativity and collaboration.

Check out these resources and free templates:

1. Use trends as resources – have 5-10 relevant trends ready to use and use as triggers for your challenge.
2. Use the candor app – have a remote brainstorm with one of our favourite online tools.
3. Get to the root of the problem with the five Whys.
4. Do the opposite of what’s expected with this ‘reverse your thinking’ tool.
5. Scamper – this is one of our favourite ways to oil the creative wheels.

We have created a short, practical ‘How To Brainstorm and Facilitate Like A Pro’ module as part of our e-learning creativity course options that you can take at your own pace and work through your own challenges to get prepared. It costs £30 + VAT and can be used in even more depth alongside the template. You can get started today. Email me claire@nowgocreate.co.uk and I’ll get you enrolled!

Or join one of our open training workshops or book an in-house session for your team. Contact lucy@nowgocreate.co.uk

The post What We’ve Learned From Facilitating Over 500 Creative Workshops first appeared on Now Go Create.

Ice-breakers and brainstorm warm-ups get a bad rep. But these 9 mood-setters will get you off to a great creative start…

A friend of mine (a self-confessed introvert) says that she has speedily got up and left the room before her turn when asked to do something in a group.

So I do get how speaking out loud at the start of a creative thinking session can be a real turn-off. But I think it’s important to do something to try to get people in the same headspace. And if you want people to be creative, you have to signal that this is not business as usual.

This applies when meeting on or offline. From my own regular facilitation experience, I find that sessions do go better when we mentally ‘warm up’ than when we don’t. And it really doesn’t have to be cringey or exposing!

A photograph to break the ice

One way I get people to warm up is to ask people to engage before the session: I allocate 10 – 15 minutes before and invite (not mandate) people to take a walk and photograph something from an unusual angle. We then share it – and find a fresh perspective.

Or it can be a good idea to just take the walk for a digital break. Almost everyone takes part.

During Zoom sessions, if participants feel the need to have a cup of tea and five minutes to themselves, camera-off, that’s all good too – if that’s what they need. So many calls seem to be back-to-back-to back these days. It’s not good for our wellbeing – in so many ways.

I’m always on the hunt for interesting ways to engage with brainstorm warm ups. Some of our favourites include:

1. Draw your mood
2. What’s your theme tune today?
3. What did you want to do when you were seven?
4. On a scale of X, how are you feeling today? (X being ‘cat’, ‘monkey’, ‘cake’ or whatever you like!)
5. Virtual scavenger hunt – set a task to find something that’s older than you, for example
6. Zoom background challenge 
7. Whose desk is this?
8. Choose a virtual cocktail – or better still, what’s in your fantasy cocktail?
9. What would your superpower be if you had one?

I love this creative session icebreaker that I shared today with a group. It was prep for tomorrow and I asked them to mimic a masterpiece and create a Hepworth in vegetable form. Or turn yourself into a Van Gogh. Or explore 5 different Natural History Museums from home.

The Hepworth challenge is great: it involves turning a humble potato into a piece of sculpture and is from a treasure trove of ideas and free stuff at Google Arts and Culture.

Do you have any tips for getting in a great state to create and your favourite brainstorm warm ups? Keep them to hand and share with your team so you have lots of options to hand when you need them.

Join one of our online training sessions if you want to learn more tips about how to get the most out of your brainstorm warm-ups and creative workshops. Or try downloading our free brainstorm prep cheat. 

The post How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice. first appeared on Now Go Create.

Steve Jobs’ main criticism of remote working was that it was impossible to innovate if employees weren’t together during the work week. But I think leaders can make the reality different in these Zoom-enforced times. Because I do think that you can be innovative in an online meeting.

Years before it was on-trend to have open-plan offices, communal eating spaces, free yoga and state-of-the-art coffee machines, Jobs realised that serendipitous encounters between Pixar staff from diverse backgrounds and departments made for better ideas.

The idea of a workplace campus is common today, but Jobs appeared to have the ability to see round corners into the future of office design. He even engineered the placement of the bathrooms at Pixar to ensure that people would bump into each other frequently.

Apple’s HQ is a never-ending loop, where people would stumble across new colleagues every single day, deliberately by accident. Meanwhile, over at Google, staff used a basic human need to drive interaction – food.

No part of the office was said to be more than 150 feet from a nibble or two, while employees were encouraged to “snack constantly”. It meant they would bump into coworkers from different teams across the company.

But times, they say, are a-changing…

How working from home changed everything

What happens now that these tech giants (like many other businesses) can no longer have their staff working in the office? For the time being at least, we have a new ‘normal’. And that means many of us working from home, alone, living on Zoom calls and seeing our colleagues infrequently. So what does that mean for creativity and innovation?

In the spirit of solving the big issues we are all facing in our lives and our businesses, we have to hope that Jobs’ assertion that innovation is impossible if people are not physically together is wrong. Because what the world needs more than ever is big ideas – and even bigger action.

The truth is that we have to work harder today to make innovation happen. Just because we’re not in the same place doesn’t mean it can’t occur, but we need to invest time and energy and allow for ‘creative collisions’ to take place across the digital space.

1. Make creativity visible

Your data, fledgling ideas and concepts need to be visible to everyone on the team if you want to spark ideas and get the best from the collective hive mind. Try using one of the many online whiteboard tools to create a space where people can interact and ideas can be easily viewed and added to.

Many of these come with ready-to-go templates such as a SWOT. So you have a blank space to draw and add shapes, text or Post-it notes – just as you would in a physical meeting space.

2. Use collaborative tech

In the absence of staff sharing bathrooms, it’s important for businesses to be clever with the technology they use to facilitate interactions. Try a tool such as Candor. You begin by sending your question out to members of your group – making it clear that you want them to come up with ideas remotely.

All of the ideas are submitted via the app/desktop tool to whoever is organising the session. And these ideas can then be shared remotely. All of the ideas are up for discussion – they can be eliminated, grouped together or expanded on to make them better.

The tool then lets participants vote for their favourites. We’re also loving MURAL here at NGC HQ for its fab templates and sharing tools.

3. Acknowledge difference in style

Creativity can’t be forced, so allow quiet time and space for reflective thinking (even online) for everyone, particularly the more introverted. Because they might be intimidated by enforced interactions.

Small online breakout rooms are good for more intimate, paired conversations. In fact, we now separate online sessions out into 3 parts – with the prep and thinking BEFORE and AFTER as important as the Zooming bit.

Read Susan’s Cain’s QUIET to understand more about how we think differently and how to get the best from your teams.

4. Create shared moments

Work is about more than the work. Creativity is able to thrive when people feel good personally. So, think about what experiences you could create for your team even though you’re not together.

Could you all buy the same ingredients and make lunch over Zoom? Or could you send people something old-school in the post that relates to your meeting or brainstorm? Or take a leaf out of Google’s book and send some really great snacks.

Since the start of the pandemic, we have developed a stack of new e-learning solutions designed to help people with their remote creativity training. Need more details? Drop us a line at: claire@nowgogreate.co.uk

The post How to innovate on Zoom first appeared on Now Go Create.

We’re going over all our favourite facilitation tools and discovering some new ones! We were reminded of the simple and effective tool from Liberating Structures that we think would work just as brilliantly for brainstorming online to generate ideas and involve everyone on the call.

‘1-2-4-All’ is a fab and deceptively simple facilitation method to engage everyone simultaneously in generating questions, ideas, and suggestions. It works brilliantly for brainstorming online, too.

Why does 1-2-4 All work?

• It immediately includes everyone regardless of how large the group is.
• It helps to generate better ideas and more of them faster than ever before.
• Tap the know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance.
• It leads to open, generative conversation. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion.

How to do it:

You all the group to start working alone, then in pairs, then in fours, and finally as a whole group. Simples!

1. Silent self-reflection by individuals on a shared challenge, framed as a question (e.g. In what ways might we….What ideas do you have that might solve this challenge?) 1 min.
2. Generate ideas in pairs, building on ideas from self-reflection. 2 min (1 min each way).
3. Share and develop ideas from your pair in foursomes (notice similarities and differences). You might need to allow a bit more time to bring people back together online to go to 4’s. Around 5-8 min.
4. Ask, “What is one idea that stood out in your conversation?” Each group shares one important idea with all (repeat cycle as needed). 5 min.

You might like to play around with the timings if you are running this online. Using a tool like Zoom, you can break people out into side rooms for these discussions.

Group size:

4-40 (the bigger the group the more debrief airtime you need).

Facilitator expertise:

Beginner.

Facilitator Tips: Things to think about for your session (and adapt for brainstorming online):

The post Free (brainstorming online) facilitation tool – 1-2-4-ALL first appeared on Now Go Create.

I’ve been looking at different ways of using apps, tools, note-taking apps etc to help make things easier for us all working remotely. And of course we have a new verb in play: To Zoom, you Zoom, I Zoom, we all Zoom. Noun: Zoomstorm.

Anyway, I was reminded of the interview I did with a leading expert in this area, Dr Sara Jones who is Senior Lecturer, Creative Interactive System Design at the Cass Business School in London who shared some of her favourite tech tools with me as part of the research for my book. (I also studied with her on the MICL, and she’s awesome).

I was reminded about how digital tools can tools could enhance creativity can be categorized (thanks to creativity researcher Todd Lubart) who suggested that computer-based in 4 different ways.  By acting as:

1. Nannies (that help with things like project planning)
2. Pen-pals (that make it easier to communicate your ideas)
3. Colleagues (that help you generate ideas when you’re stuck)
4. Coaches (providing information about potentially useful techniques that you might want to use on your project).

I’ve categorised and linked some of our favourite tools below.

“Technology is ever-changing and so the specifics of exactly what tech tools to use for creativity are also constantly changing. Who knows where developments in AI, robotics, Internet of things, big data and block chain technology will take us over the next thirty years? I’ve made some general suggestions about how to choose your tools, and given examples of where current tools can help.” Dr Sara Jones

The following includes extracts from my book from the interview with Sara.

How to choose your online creativity tool

“So first, when choosing a tech tool, always consider which parts of your creative process a digital tool or technology could help with, and which you should perhaps still leave to the humans. Computers are great at processing, storing and letting you search through huge amounts of information, but not so great, yet anyway, at empathy, emotion, and being creative without human assistance.

Digital pens, for use on whiteboards, tablets or plain old paper have come a long way in the last few years, but all still require at least some set-up, and few have the familiarity and flexibility of the non-digital equivalent in terms of immediate ease of use. Digital post-its now also come in many forms with increasingly sophisticated functionality, with some tools, like Post-it Plus, offering perhaps the best of both worlds, in which you can write down your ideas using old school pen and post-it style paper, but then capture these digitally. This enables you to share ideas with colleagues who missed the session they were generated in, reorganise them on the fly, and incorporate them into future digital project documentation.”

Tool: Nannies

These tools help you to get organised with things like: Trello, Todoist, Asana and Google Sheets. I’d put file storage and document sharing into nannies too such as DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box.

Then there are the free survey tools like SurveyMonkey which can help to gather info and feedback pre and post online workshops as well as customer insights.

Note taking apps like Evernote and Notion make this aspect easier, saveable and shareable.

Tool: Pen-pals (that make it easier to communicate your ideas)

There are several online mind mapping tools, including Coggle (https://coggle.it) Popplet (http://popplet.com) that allow you to share ideas online and perhaps after a creative session.

Online whiteboards, like Miro and Stormboard allow you to to share ideas and present:

• Miro (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android) for formal presentation of your whiteboard
• Stormboard (Web) for creating multiple whiteboards in a single brainstorming session
• The MURAL canvas can house multiple whiteboard areas that you can rearrange and resize as needed. On each whiteboard, you can go with the standard blank white background, or choose from a variety of templates to add pre-built grids and content boxes for some additional structure. Voting is also easy.

Tool: Digital coaches

Several digital tools are available to help you choose what other tools and techniques you want to use for your creative process, and offer guidance on how to do this. The Creative Whack Pack app, based on the work of Roger von Oech or the IDEO Method cards app, based on methods included in IDEO’s design thinking approach, both give instructions for different creative thinking techniques.

The becreative service available at http://becreative.city.ac.uk makes suggestions for what techniques to use when, as well as guidance on how to use them.

What do you get? Advice on how to use a range of creative tools and techniques, and sometimes also advice on what tools or techniques might work particularly well for you and your creative process.

Tool: Digital colleagues

Almost every week new apps and websites appear, all of which are designed to help you use some of the tried and tested creative thinking techniques and tools that you already know. Some of these just provide what you need to use the technique in digital form, for convenience –like the Brightsparks tool, available from http://brightsparks.city.ac.uk that provides everything you need to use the Hall of Fame technique. Others do some of the hard work for you. For example, the Carer tool (Maiden et al, 2013), designed to help carers of people with dementia come up with creative solutions to challenging situations in care homes, uses natural language processing and case based reasoning to find creative solutions to problems by searching a large database of examples of best practice in related areas.

How to do it: For some of these tools, such as Brightsparks, you can just download the app or visit the website. To use others, like Carer, you need more specific knowledge of the subject area they have been designed to be used in.

Search tools, like Ask Nature offer a more creative approach to searching for information online than more conventional alternatives.

Engagement tools: which can be great for online meetings and large events (when we get back to those) things like: Mentimeter and Slido (Now Go Create recently used this at a large conference and it was great).

New webinars to the rescue!

We are taking some of our most popular courses and running them as webinars, including How To Facilitate Creative Sessions Remotely – featuring online creativity tools as well as much more. Take a look here if you want to help unleash other’s creativity on your next call.

The post 23 free online creativity tools for remote workshops & brainstorms first appeared on Now Go Create.