5 Barriers to Creativity at Work

Welcome, firstly to my newsletter Growth Through Innovation, and secondly to part five of a series on the importance of creative thinking at work and how to unleash it in yourself and your teams.

Today we're diving into the five barriers to individual and team creativity and how to overcome them!

Ideas are the currency of any innovation, customer experience, technology, people, or transformation program, yet most organisations aren’t purposely set up to encourage creativity to flourish. In fact, often the way they are set up has the opposite effect and unintentionally kills creativity.

Without creativity there are no ideas, and without ideas your work, teams, and workshops will stagnate and not achieve their desired purpose. Creativity plays a key role in unlocking gnarly problems and providing fresh new solutions and ways of working that drive the momentum that is so important for innovation and growth.

There are a number of proven methods to unleash yours and your team’s creativity to be in the zone more often and increase their problem-solving capability and the quantity and uniqueness of their ideas. What helps is recognising the key blockers to creativity and how to overcome them. Five of the biggest blockers to creativity in teams and workshops are: our beliefs, everyday behaviours, the brain, state and space.

It is important when you are setting up your work space, workshop, ideation phase, or innovation lab that you design it to overcome these common barriers.

Creativity Blocker 1: Beliefs

We are all born creative, but often it gets drummed out of us through school, tertiary studies, and society.?By the time we join the work force we no longer believe we are creative.

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain one when you grow up." Pablo Picasso

If you believe yourself incapable of having ideas and thinking creatively it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - suspending disbelief is critical. The key steps to rekindling belief in your teams is to:

1. Ask them to suspend disbelief, even if just for a moment,

2. Give them an experience applying and using create thinking skills, tools and techniques,

3. Have fun and successes,

4. Revisit their beliefs and repeat if required.

Overtime applying these steps, and the tools we’ll cover below, will help build your team’s creative confidence and belief!

"When creativity is regarded as a magic gift, there is nothing that can be done about it. But everyone can develop some skill in lateral thinking and those who develop?most skill will be most creative." Edward de Bono

Creativity Blocker 2: Behaviours

Our everyday business behaviour is not conducive to creativity. It has been refined over the years to help us in a fast-paced world where swift analysis and making quick decisions based on sound evidence is king. It involves elements of criticism and relies on critical reasoning skills when we are assessing one idea or recommendation versus another. It’s not that this approach is wrong, it’s just not conducive to creativity.

In the early stages of the creative process ideas are still forming and are not yet ready to be judged. We need to build on them further before we can confidently determine which are the good and bad ideas.

When you are working in the creative phase or running a workshop you need to ask everyone to suspend their typical business-world behaviours and take these steps to promote creativity:

1. Suspend your judgement, so you can then

2. Understand each other’s ideas, in order to

3. Build on each other’s ideas to come up with more and better solutions.

Creativity Blocker 3: The Brain

Most of us naturally think in a linear and analytical way. This is because the brain is a massive self-organising storage device, like all the folders on your desktop or shared drive. It’s a place where logic presides.

When you ask your brain to think of an idea, say a new type of hotel experience, then it immediately goes into its file on hotels. And what does it find in there? All the experiences you’ve had with regard to hotels over your life. And none of it is new thinking.

What you need to do is ‘trick’ your brain to go to a different file and find some other stimulus to inspire new ideas. For example, you could come up with unique ideas by ‘breaking the rules’ and challenge the status quo of the hotel industry. One ‘rule’ for the hotel industry was that hotels had to own rooms. Airbnb broke this rule through outsourcing the ownership and providing of the rooms.

Creativity Blocker 4: State

If you feel completely stuck, then ideas are impossible. With many teams working remotely, we must work extra hard to overcome virtual meeting and workshop fatigue. Whilst some of us feel more in flow working from home, most of us still feel physically, mentally, and emotionally drained after a day of Teams or Zoom calls.

The key to changing your teams’ state is getting them moving (a bit harder, but not impossible, in a virtual workshop) and by being really playful and encouraging self-expression, which really opens up our creative minds giving us access to our own creative genius.

For virtual workshops, you need to dial up what you’d normally do for a face-to-face workshop. For example, during plenary sessions, I’m making it as inclusive as possible and really encouraging questions and discussion. I also dial up the fun. Just because you’re having fun doesn’t mean you’re not taking it seriously. Start the workshop with music and welcome people back from breakouts with happy and upbeat messaging. Further into the sessions you can even incorporate a bit of dress up to liven things up further.

Breaks are as important as ever. I schedule active 5-minute breaks on the hour and 15-minute breaks every two hours. During the breaks I get everyone to get up and move around, go outside and get some fresh air if possible. If online, I ask everyone to go on mute and turn their cameras off from both a ‘switching off’ and ‘embarrassment safety’ perspective.

Creativity Blocker 5: Space

One of the biggest triggers to state and our creativity is the environment or space we are in. Many of our workplaces, including our working from home setups, are designed for meetings and getting stuff done rather than being creative. It is important that we have spaces that encourage creativity and collaboration in all our flexi-working environments (both physical and virtual).

A space for creativity is one where you can be yourself, get away from the day-to-day distractions and noise, be inspired and become totally engrossed in the work you are doing. It could be a quiet and comfortable room in your house or a local café. There are also some great virtual whiteboard platforms like Miro or Mural to replace the traditional whiteboards, butcher paper and sticky notes.

Through these tips we can unleash our teams’ creativity and boost their creative confidence.

Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed it, please like and/or reshare, and add your thoughts and questions into the comments or DM me.

Happy innovating,

Nathan