Games and activities are not just for fun and team building. They can also help you foster innovation by stimulating creativity, collaboration, and experimentation. In this article, you will learn how to use games and activities to facilitate innovation in your workshops, meetings, or projects.
Games and activities can create a safe and playful environment where people can express their ideas, challenge their assumptions, and learn from each other. They can also break the ice, energize the group, and generate engagement. Games and activities can help you achieve different innovation goals, such as generating new ideas, prototyping solutions, testing assumptions, or validating results.
All the innovation work you do, as with development work, should be structured around active-passive learning. Use classic methods for the passive - presentations & documentation - to set boundary constraints. Use a range of activities to encourage deep exploration of what is possible within the guiding constraints you set within the passive elements. Without such guiding constraints, the innovative activity can veer in any direction, including harmful ones, meaning lots of energy is being expended on ideas that have high risk and/or little reward. Without the active element, especially minimally facilitated ones, nobody gets to push the boundaries to wider and more interesting places.
Being active is the key to creativity. A recent survey I did here on LinkedIn shows that many people have their best ideas when they are completely relaxed - in the shower or in bed - or during physical activities such as jogging and swimming. In workshops, such activities have a significant influence on the results. Two approaches are particularly effective in fostering creativity: 1. a relaxed atmosphere through mindfulness exercises. 2. challenges that take participants out of their comfort zone. Both open the mind to new ideas.
I prefer to refer to spaces like this as brave spaces as opposed to safe -- brave brings an element of action where people take action to open up and participate not just making others feel comfortable enough to do so. Activities and games with playful purpose are key to helping people tap into creative problem solving. While some people may dismiss this as childish, it's absolutely not, it's a way to bring joy in even as you're tackling challenges. A joyful minds finds more possibilities. Of course there's a continuum depending on your topic, it's up to you as a facilitator HOW you present an activity and what tone you give it.
Choosing the right games and activities to foster innovation can be tricky. When selecting, it is important to consider the relevance of the activity to your innovation goal and the problem you are trying to solve. Additionally, it should promote diversity of perspectives, skills, and backgrounds. Moreover, the game or activity should challenge participants to think outside the box , take risks, and experiment with new possibilities. Finally, it should be fun and rewarding for the participants, creating a positive and motivating atmosphere.
I once asked a group of people to take three items out of their pocket, purse, or bag and make something new with them that would make the person sitting next to them laugh. The goal was to show the group they can have an innovative mindset. Games don't have to be complicated. And you can create your own simple games for facilitation. Just be crystal clear on your innovation intent for the game, and let yourself be innovative in the creation of it.
If you want to design your own games and activities to foster innovation, you can start by defining your innovation goal and the problem you are trying to solve, as well as identifying your target audience and their needs, preferences, and expectations. Brainstorm different game or activity concepts that fit your goal, problem, and audience, and then select the best concept and refine it by defining the rules, materials, duration, and outcomes. To ensure your game or activity is successful, test it with a small group of users and collect feedback. From there, you can iterate and improve your game or activity based on the feedback.
Facilitating games and activities to foster innovation requires some skills and techniques, such as introducing the game or activity, explaining the purpose, rules, and expected outcomes, as well as creating a safe and supportive environment for the participants. During the process, you should monitor the progress, provide support, feedback, and encouragement, and intervene if necessary. Finally, you should facilitate a reflection session where the participants share their insights, learnings, and feedback, and discuss how to apply them to the innovation process.
Evaluating games and activities can help you measure their impact, effectiveness, and value for the innovation process. To do this, you can use surveys to ask participants to rate their satisfaction, engagement, and learning from the game or activity. Interviews can also be conducted to explore participants' opinions, feelings, and experiences from the game or activity. Observations of behavior, interactions, and outcomes during and after the game or activity can also be useful. Additionally, metrics such as the number of ideas generated, the quality of prototypes, or the validation results can be tracked and analyzed quantitatively. Ultimately, games and activities can be powerful tools to foster innovation when used wisely and effectively; they can help unlock creative potential, generate new solutions, and have fun along the way.