Got any tried and trusted creative techniques to share?
(Pam) We've all got those creative exercises that work every time. Okay so we need to find new ones (partly the purpose of this blog), but what are the ones that you always use? One person's tried and trusted might be someone else's new technique.
Here's one: Related worlds: To get people to think about a problem from a new angle. Get people into teams of 3. They should each choose a completely unrelated brand to the problem (like The Army, iPod, Cillit Bang, BMW). Get each team to first list a whole page of reasons why that brand or product has succeeded, coming up with as many descriptive words as possible. Then using that list of words as inspiration, ask yourself the question "if I were Cillit Bang, how would I approach this problem?". This works well as it forces people to come at it from a new angle or using a different strategy. It's not wildly creative, and so is a safe and often easy way of getting people to think in fresh ways.
Do you have any others to share?
Here's one: Related worlds: To get people to think about a problem from a new angle. Get people into teams of 3. They should each choose a completely unrelated brand to the problem (like The Army, iPod, Cillit Bang, BMW). Get each team to first list a whole page of reasons why that brand or product has succeeded, coming up with as many descriptive words as possible. Then using that list of words as inspiration, ask yourself the question "if I were Cillit Bang, how would I approach this problem?". This works well as it forces people to come at it from a new angle or using a different strategy. It's not wildly creative, and so is a safe and often easy way of getting people to think in fresh ways.
Do you have any others to share?
posted by ROInnovation at 6:06 AM
3 Comments:
I saw this presentation ages ago that stated people have one of three "creativity preferences": audio, visual or kinesthetic. So, whenever I'm designing an ideation, I always try to have at least one exercise that is focused on each of the aforementioned.
Simple examples include (1) Audio - listening to music to capture the emotions of a product experience, or listening to the sounds of a customer interacting with your product or service, (2) Visual - having people build collages to express their product / service vision, or showing video clips of customer interviews that are choc full of insight, and (3) Kinesthetic - I love prototyping exercises... it brings out a more artistic, creative side in participants.
With this kind of approach to ideation, there's always a "morale" to the story. At the end of the day you can discuss the different learning styles, ask participants which exercise they found made ideation easiest... and consider that a suggestion of what their "creative preference" might be.
That's the tip of the iceberg though. I'd LOVE to see a battery of responses on this issue - because I know there's lots of tried and true techniques out there.
Hey Scott I really like your comment - I think too often we rely on the tried and trusted and don't challenge ourselves to cover the multi-sensory. It becomes difficult as a participant to feel inspired when you're repeating the same celebral exercise.
I liked that technique you used in that 1 workshop we did together where you'd recorded loads of different songs that related in some way to the topic of the day. We listened to 30 seconds of about 10 different songs, one after the other, and as individuals just wrote a stream of consciousness of thoughts on paper that we then used as inpiration for more ideas. It worked well - and I think it's always important to have some exercises that peopledo alone, like visualisation or this one, so that those who are more introverted are able to perform at their best.
Come on other ROI bloggers - please tell us your techniques, this stream could be so useful to everyone!
Anything! even if you think it's obvious! please!
Pam
Right, some of my favourite techniques:
Personfication - bring to life the person from a target group or segmentation. First off give them a name, then think about age, occupation, hobbies, what they enjoy doing... any useful demographic or emotional info that will help to make them more real.
Then do a collage, thinking about what images/brands/ photos etc could be relevant to this person.
Then you can either ideate from there or combine it with Lifecycle - map out this persons day/ week/ month with a focus on the category you are looking at. Then put in where you think the key moments of usuage are for your category and product.
Then ideate around this, can you move the category into different occasions or generate new product/ service ideas.
hope this helps will put some more up.
Adam
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