Three Exercises to Get Your Creativity Flowing

Fostering creativity is becoming increasingly important in the business world as the pace of innovation and bringing products to the marketplace speeds up. By using creativity exercises you can prompt creative thinking in your entire staff, giving them permission to invent new processes, create new advertising approaches, or come up with completely new products.

While many people think of artists living a wild lifestyle when they approach the idea of creativity, in reality, creativity can be enhanced through practice. Most people are not born with inherent creativity. Instead, they learn to be creative when they practice creativity. Here are three simple creativity exercises to foster a sense of innovation and inventiveness in your workplace.

Make a Mind Map

Break out of the checklist mode by switching to mind mapping. To create a mind map, write the central challenge your business faces on a piece of paper or white board. Start adding any idea that comes to mind that is related to that central challenge in any way. Draw branches to connect ideas, and allow new ideas to have their own branches. When one thought seems key, draw a box around it and let it generate more ideas. The ideas can be unpredictable and seemingly unconnected. Keep the exercise going until you're out of things to add. Return to the mind map later to organize your dissociative thoughts into a helpful framework with which you can move forward.

Build on Others' Ideas

If your team is facing multiple challenges, write each of them on a separate piece of paper; include even small or silly sounding issues. Post the pieces of paper around a room, bring your team into the room, and hand each member a pencil. Have the team members wander around the room making random comments on the papers. Encourage them not to walk in a circle, but to move in a free-form fashion around the room and to return to papers where they've already commented. You'll find this creativity exercise allows people to build on one another's ideas without having to worry about office politics, inherent shyness or worry about what others will think, and you're likely to see fresh and creative approaches to issues that no one has brought up before.

Take a Walk

It's no coincident that the previous creativity exercise got people on their feet and moving. Psychologists have found that creativity is enhanced when people walk as they think or talk. This may be the case because the moving body triggers the mind to move more freely from one association to another. Get your team – or even just yourself – up from the desk and outside to hold a walking meeting, and watch how much more creative everyone's ideas become.

In all these creativity exercises, make sure to give people permission to fail so as not to cut off the flow. Once your creativity exercises have begun to produce viable ideas, make sure to record them. Take seriously your own practice of creativity and that of your employees to promote out-of-the-box thinking that can turn your business upside down and set it on a new and exciting path.

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