Collaborating Creatively with your Technical Team

Creativity is essential if we want to find better ways to do things. And in this volatile and unpredictable world, our businesses need these better ways. To succeed, we must constantly adapt, innovate and evolve.

Technically minded people can, however, struggle with creativity. They often think logically and sequentially, finding problems and risks and resolving them. People who are taught to quickly see connections and downstream effects may pre-emptively tear down ideas.

How can we harness the creativity in our people while avoiding the temptation to be critical and negative?

Here are some ideas to delay "solutioneering" and help your people be more creative as a team.

Principles to encourage creativity

As a leader, you need to approach each meeting or brainstorming session with a few principles in mind:

1. Don’t poison the pool. Share your ideas last. Often, the boss’s idea of how we?could?solve a problem is interpreted as how we?should?solve it.?Avoid asking leading questions or putting boundaries around the types of answers you’re looking for. A great way to do this is to ask someone else to lead the discussion and stay silent.
2. Separate ideation from evaluation. Coming up with ideas is a separate mental activity from assessing those ideas. Avoid that urge to pick holes in a proposal before everyone has spoken and you’ve exhausted all the options.
3. Everyone has a say. Make sure everyone in your team has an opportunity to speak. Sometimes the quietest person will have the greatest insight.
4. Disconnect idea from identity. Gather ideas in a way that detaches them from their creator. In that way, when you move to evaluation, you judge the idea, not the person.

How to do this

Here are some ways to implement these principles in meetings with your team:

1. Write an agenda based on questions. Use open questions that are non-judgemental—these typically start with what or how. What should we be working on in the next month? How might we achieve this goal? What can we do to better serve this customer?
2. In your agenda, clearly state if you are generating ideas or evaluating them. Have separate items and timeframes for each mode of thinking.
3. Give participants a variety of ways to contribute. Create a Google doc for each agenda item that people can add to before, during and after the meeting. In the meeting, combine individual writing and small groups with whole group discussion. For each item, call on everyone by name to make sure you have inputs from all.
4. Help make it anonymous by capturing every idea on a central location, whether post-its on a wall or text in a spreadsheet. Group ideas into similar types.
5. Use some way of voting to prioritise ideas for further discussion.
6. Only once you’ve been through these steps can you evaluate them. Ensure you cover arguments for and against, benefits and costs. Judge ideas against an agreed set of criteria.
7. Capture the results and allow everyone to continue to contribute after the meeting.

Pumping up creativity

These seven steps will help you generate more useful and surprising ideas in your meetings. But sometimes, this won’t be enough. To help boost your creativity, consider:

1. New environments. Move outside. Go to a café or restaurant. If you’re usually online, meet in person, and vice versa.
2. New people. Have the most junior person run the meeting. Gather perspectives from someone outside your team. This person could be from a different department or external to your organisation.
3. New processes. Do you usually use a whiteboard? Try flipcharts or post-it notes. Incorporate other forms of expression, such as role play, drawing or building. Write a poem about the problem.
4. New objects. Introduce random objects and consider how they might unlock a new way of thinking about your topic. Pass the object from person to person, combining thinking with something you can touch.
5. Breaks. Go for a walk together or alone. Listen to music or watch a TED talk. Or take a longer break. Leave the problem overnight and return to it tomorrow.

Where to start?

Creativity is critical to your success. It’s not sufficient to keep doing the same things the same way, every day. Finding new ideas, innovative processes and additional value for your customers will help keep you relevant, effective and affordable.

Sometimes, though, we can get stuck in our ways. To break through this and boost your team’s creativity, start by doing one thing differently. Pick one of the ideas above and implement it in your next team meeting. Soon, you’ll be uncovering wonderful new concepts to keep your organisation growing and winning.

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Thank you for reading this edition of Technically Speaking. I hope it has been useful for you.

I have three small requests:

• If you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please share it with them.
• Please let me know if there is a topic you would like me to address in a future article. This topic was suggested by Daryl Melhuish (thank you Daryl).
• If you'd like to have more effective and creative communication in your organisation, DM me or email [email protected]. Let's chat.