How can you build team trust and safety with CPS?

START WITH BUILDING TRUST AT THE START There’s only one moment to start creating psychological safety and trust in a new group: at the start. In my work as innovation facilitator we create trust at the pre-kickoff by asking everyone to do storytelling on their best team experience ever. And afterwards ask every participant to state obe team value that is crucial for them the coming innovation journey. So we end the session with a list of 10+ team values everyone commits to ?????.

To be truly inclusive of divergent thinkers, a good strategy is to give space and time for individual brainstorming and then inviting them to a group brainstorming. Even though negative judgment is often times called out and removed from brainstorming sessions, introverted team members might still feel quite intimidated to contribute in a group setting especially after someone throws a great idea that make everyone’s head nod.

The GOLDEN RULE is to START POSTPONING YOUR JUDGMENT. In my experience as facilitator of innovation teams you can balance creativity and constraints in a perfect way following these three simple steps: 1. Draft an innovation assignment in which you state all the goals, all the constraints and all the criteria the new solutions have to meet. 2. Diverge by drafting a brainstorm assignment in the form of a “How can we …” question, and start brainstorming postponing your judgement, ignoring all constraints. 3. Converge by selecting the best solutions fitting all the constraints, and work them out as concepts, pretotypes and new business cases. Following these steps will make you an amazing innovator. Lots of success, Gijs

EXPERIMENT BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION WITH PRETOTYPING. What is pretotyping? YOU FAKE IT BEFORE YOU MAKE IT ???. Check it out here … Pretotyping is a technique for testing hypotheses and validating ideas quickly and cost-effectively. It involves creating a simplified version of a product or service to collect user feedback and understand market demand. For example, in the food industry, a company may pretotype a new salad recipe by offering a limited quantity to a small group of potential customers to gauge their interest before investing in full-scale production. Pretotyping helps reduce the risk of failure by assessing market response early in the development process. Check out the Tesla example in this section ?????

In my experience, accountability buddies are great to keep each other honest and on track with commitments. It not only fosters trust but builds team confidence. A great side effect is great work friendship and relationship building.

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) was very popular in the last 20th century. Nowadays a lot of tools would be classified as DESIGN THINKING. Design thinking became vey popular since it was sparked at IDEO and promoted by Stanford at the start of this century. Design Thinking goes a step beyond CPS as it does not end with ideas but most delivers concrete designs. It is a user-centric approach, encourage collaboration, and create innovative solutions to problems. Here are 5 of the most relevant DT TOOLS: 1. Empathy Mapping. 2. Brainstorming: 3. PRETOTYPING. 4. User Testing. 5. Journey Mapping. In the proven best-practice FORTH innovation methodology we merge design thinking with business reality producing amazing innovation results ?????.