The Lone Creative Genius

Toys are great tools for fostering an environment that inspires creativity, but if you aren’t comfortable bringing toys into the equation, you can create a similar atmosphere using something as simple as a whiteboard. The secret is not really in the toys - it can be anything that fans the flames of creativity by encouraging people to loosen up and think in different ways.

In our last post, we discussed methods of establishing an environment that is conducive to creativity, in order to help your team generate a great deal of ideas in a short period. Now we’ll talk about the first of two techniques that can help further that idea. The Mind Map is geared toward freeing up the left-brain thinkers.

We are only on this earth for a relatively short time; no one knows which day may be their last. I have a passion for helping people to find joy and fulfillment in their professional and personal lives. “Life is too short not to do everything you possibly can to enjoy the life you have now.”

We’ve been discussing Impact versus Effort, and in our last post, we talked about how well it works when all of the ideas that need to be evaluated are already written on sticky notes. Now we’ll talk about how to use the notes to organize the ideas you’ve generated. It’s a good idea to ask a neutral party to conduct the discussion and posting of each idea in whichever quadrant the team feels is most reflective of that idea's impact and effort to execute.

We’ve been talking about organizing data your team generates from brainstorming sessions and other creative processes, and how to use the Decision Matrix to do this. In this post, we’ll wrap up the Decision Matrix process.

We’ve been talking about methods for refining and organizing information in order to create an actionable plan. In our last post, we focused on the Decision Matrix. Ideal for helping to weigh ideas based on multiple factors, the process for using the Decision Matrix begins with a group brainstorming session to determine the criteria you’ll use to evaluate ideas. In this post, we’ll move on to the next phase, where that criteria is refined.

Now that your team’s ideas have been thoroughly evaluated, you’ve reached the final step of your process. It's now time to reach an agreement on what will be implemented, and what needs to be discussed and clarified. Congratulations! You’re well on your way to solving your original problem.

In previous posts, we discussed using techniques like Mind Mapping and Brainwriting to stimulate your team’s creativity and generate ideas. Now it’s time to channel all those great ideas into a viable action plan! How do you pull all that creativity together in an actionable way? We’ve got two very effective techniques to discuss: the Impact versus Effort Grid and the Decision Matrix. In this post, we’ll talk about the Impact/Effort Grid.