Creativity and innovation - The Splosh Factor

How to be more Creative and Innovative

Find the next Open Creativity and Innovation Workshop

Job Creativity and Innovation - The Splosh Factor

Develop your business
Review some of those things that once worked so well
Help people who are finding old habits hard to break
Recharge your creative and imaginative batteries

The Splosh Factor allows people to rediscover or refresh their creativity. It usually takes place in a playroom environment where participants can make as much mess as they like. They may even be given overalls to wear, partly to protect their clothing but also to create a feeling of being 'different'. We use a wide variety of materials such as finger paints, cardboard, pegs, bluetack, string, balloons, balls, sticks, etc.

The Splosh Factor uses games and processes that encourage creativity, self-expression and rule-breaking to overturn the normal rules of behaviour. This creates an atmosphere of slight anarchy and a wide level of permission that is very fertile.

Within this environment people are enabled to:

Express themselves in a fashion that is normally denied to them
Bond as a group in a significant way
Discuss where some of the log jams are within the company or team
Come up with effective ways of sorting things out
Blow off steam about things that are blocking their lives and work

This workshop format is adaptable to various settings. It can be used at a conference with multiple rooms and trainers to give everyone in the company a fun workout and chance to generate new ideas. It can be done with a smaller specific team working to a specific objective. It can be the approach to a team day for an entire small company.

By over throwing the conventional way of doing things for just a day, The Splosh Factor can bypass months of frustration and disappointment.

Find the next Open Creativity and Innovation Workshop

Job Creativity and Innovation - The Splosh Factor

Creativity and Innovation

"There's no such thing as creativity; you just assemble what's already there."
George Balanchine

Well, when your neck is on the line, a deadline is looming and it seems as though all eyes are on you to come up with the next creative strategy, even assembling what's already there can seem impossible.

Or there may be times when you've done the same presentation over and over, you're writing the same words, coming up with solutions that don't have that certain spark and in general your ideas seem stale and tired. You feel uncreative and uninspired. Dull.

A lot of times our creativity is hampered by the 'rules' we think we are supposed to operate by: be logical, don't be messy, be structured, get it right. The very concept of rules is pretty much antithetical to the creative process and yet we let them constrict us and limit what we allow ourselves to do.

Creativity comes from laying aside the rules - even for just a little while - so that we are able to reach beyond logic and structure and tap into our imaginations more easily. This is the place where we store our sense of the ridiculous, our sense of being able to do the impossible and ultimately, our ability to see things differently and find new and usable solutions.

Then we can assemble what's already there.

So let's begin at the beginning (not always the best place to start when trying to be creative, but we do need a little bit of logic here!). If you're working with a group of people and want to open up the whole idea of creativity with them, here are some suggestion.

An interesting kick-off is to run an open discussion about what creativity is.

If we pose as a given that we are all creative, we were born that way and are all able to pinpoint areas of our lives where we are or have been creative, then what we often find is that people don't usually see themselves as creative. 'Oh I'm not creative, I can't draw, I don't sing, write, play music, invent things,' etc.

So it may well be that we are habitually less creative than we might be because we've talked ourselves into some very strong beliefs about what being creative actually means. We think of ourselves as not creative types therefore we habitually don't challenge ourselves to try.

Look at the way that society and the workplace wants us to follow the rules and therefore be less creative. Then look at the way children are seen as being naturally creative and are given endless encouragement to paint, draw and express themselves.

To quote Picasso "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after growing up". Ditto creativity.

Get your group to 'define' this elusive thing called creativity.

Next, let's take a look at the next question: why do we think creativity is important?

Well to start with it’s one of the ways we cope with change. If we are creative, if we are skilled at innovation we can come up with new ways of approaching situations that have changed.

Another quote "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over in the same way and expecting different results."

We are programmed to be creative, so much so that we see chronically uncreative people as ill!

On a practical level being creative allows us to come up with new ideas that help us to beat the competition.

On a daily level it allows us to solve every day problems. "Why don't we try this?" - "How about using this approach?" - "What if we look at it this way?"

In the modern world new information comes along on a daily (hourly, even) basis. Today’s problems cannot be solved with yesterday's solutions. What worked yesterday won't work now; therefore creative, innovative people are highly valued.

If you want something new you have to do something different. The thing is, it doesn't have to be massively different, but it does require a shift in thinking and beliefs.

What's more being creative is fun.

Ok so if all this is true why are we not all creative all the time?

Well quite frankly we'd go mad! Just think of a world populated with people who were all wildly creative all the time. It would be like a bunch of uncontrollable adult sized children. We need rules.

So these are the Rules most adults are encouraged to live by.

This is the way we are all normally required to operate in the work place. We need rules like this in order to create efficient business environments, but a dramatic side effect is that they absolutely block the creative flow.

Indeed, some of these rules so completely stifle our innovative streaks that when we are called upon to use them, they've shrivelled up.

These rules are good for us some of the time, perhaps even most of the time, but if you want to help yourself or others be more creative you could do worse than taking a look at what happens when we don't follow them.

So if you turn the list of rules upside down you'll get something like this.

Anti Rules!

The most important of these we think is to get back to play. All the time things are serious, all the time there has to be an output that is judged as good or bad, people may feel that they should be creative, but only a little bit, just in case they get it wrong.

Ok, Ok, you're saying. I get all that. Now how do I and my team start being more creative and figure out how to break some of those rules?

The following stuff is taken from our Creativity Workout sessions - feel free to give them a go!

Innovation and Creativity Through Rule Breaking

Here is a list of some innovative games, which focus on rules and rule-breaking.

Just the names suggest a mild form of anarchy, a slight feeling of danger and that anything might happen.

And just looking at the titles of these games, you could even begin to make up how to play them.

But we'll give you an idea of how a few of them work.

Eye/no eye contact

Divide your group into As and Bs. Have As make deliberate eye contact and Bs not as they walk briskly around the room. Reverse it so that As make no eye contact and Bs do. Reverse it again.

Animal (or dog – dog – dog)

In a circle with one person (facilitator) in the middle. Give each place a single syllable animal name. If you can say the name of their animal 3 times before they can say it once, you stand in their place and they come into the middle. The name of the animal stays with the place not the person. Encourage constructive cheating. Change to 4 and even 5 times as they get the hang of it. This game encourages people to cheat, to be devious, to look for ways to win by doing unexpected things

Pick up. (Can be done in pairs or in a group).

Find 10 different ways to get one person not touching the floor. You are looking to stimulate inventiveness and to break down physical barriers (careful with less active or mobile people)

Name Things Wrong

Have people run round the room naming things out loud and fast. Then ask them to name things wrong. This should get louder and faster and be brought to a sudden stop.

Whilst people are doing the kind of activity that obviously has no point other than the game itself, they are more able to see where they block creative impulses and follow the normal rules. It can be helpful during a session like this to ask out loud "What rule are you breaking now?" or even "What rule can't you break now?"

When people have got past the initial reluctance to just muck about for a while you can introduce some games and processes based more in the reality of their lives and work. For instance:

The Strangest Thing

Each person to briefly describe the strangest thing that ever happened to them.

The Usual Suspects

This exercise is about self- disclosure. It’s a powerful technique for gaining empathy. It’s not about each person rendering up dark secrets; it’s about letting out an occasional chink of non-work personality.

Split into two teams. Each individual lists three things about themselves on a flip chart that the rest of the group might not know. Each team them looks at the lists and guesses which individual matches with three unknown facts. To give you an idea, we often ask people to dig back in their memory to see who won a swimming medal, who's father was a spy, who's uncle met a Hollywood star, that kind of thing.

Create a Character

Have the whole group or teams within the group make a list of friends, relatives, acquaintances and identify their idiosyncrasies, quirks, eccentricities. Then have them create a character incorporating all these oddities. Give the character a name and then have someone make a presentation as that character being the group spokesperson.

Create a Political Party

Divide the group into as many political parties you want. Get each group to give their party a name, have them create a party manifesto and then give them 2 minutes to present it. There has to be one promise they know they can’t keep.

Vote.

Processes like these help people to move between the worlds of reality and make believe. It is this ability to shift from one perspective to the other that creative people have developed.

When Impact Factory runs creativity sessions for various groups we find that most people need time to ease their way into rule breaking. At first everyone tends to behave and not break any rules outright. Then one or two people may not do things exactly how we ask them to. The beginnings of deliberate rule breaking are likely to arise about an hour into the session. Pushing people to get there quicker can be counter productive. You may get to a very resistant place where people are saying "what's the point of all this".

Here is some feedback from people who have been through a creativity session

As you focus on more serious issues you will find that people drift back into following the rules and you will need to introduce little interventions to open up people's thinking.

The one technique that everyone likes and seems able to engage with is the "make it worse" trick.

With this all you do is take a time out from any problem or issue the group is dealing with and spend five minutes looking at what you could do to make things worse, to make the project crash and burn. Why people like this so much is that they can be as outrageous as they like and it won't matter!

Equally important, however, is that when you come up with ideas that could make something worse, you often come up with possibilities that might actually happen if you don't keep an eagle eye on things. By seeing what could indeed make a project crash and burn you can put safeguards in place to stop that happening.

Having got to the place where people are playing with their ability to "get creative" you can move to working on something serious and relevant, but with the same spirit of fun and play.

Having given you the Anti-Rules, here are some more we think are really useful when working creatively with a group of people, especially around work-related projects:

Everyone's ideas should be considered and debated, no matter how foolish or unfeasible they may seem.

Everyone in the group should contribute something, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.

Don't rule things out as you go along - wait till everything's on the table and then do the weeding.

Write it all down - you never know when it might come in handy.

And do, please, have fun!

Find the next Public Creativity and Innovation Workshop

Name:
Email:
Format:	HTML Text only
Enter the security code:

Creativity and innovation - The Splosh Factor. Communication skills training courses, presentation skills programmes, public speaking, leadership development and executive coaching.