Pump the Creative Juice at your workplace
Posted by admin at January 28th, 2008
After receiving an email from a loyal reader, I decided to give him what he wanted. His email read something like this,
“Mitesh your last post on ‘Train your team to become creative’ was a very easy to follow read. I in fact tried it out with my staff. I own a small restaurant here in Austin Texas, and my staff had a marvelous time with your exercise. Not only that, after we were done, they wanted to try another exercise. So Mitesh, what else do you have in store to help me get my staff thinking ‘smarter’ as you would call it.”
Well my friend lets try a new approach. My conventional approach is about people working together building on top of ideas. In this case, we will do just that, but it will be a secretive way of building ideas.
Materials:
Black Marker for each person, and a sheet of paper for each person.
Before I tell you exactly how fun this exercise is and how great the imagination sparks from this activity, I will start by giving out the directions
Directions
- Fold the paper into three sections.
- Only let the top portion of the paper be visible.
- Instruct your team that you will be drawing a character, but for round 1 of 3 you will only be drawing the head. Make sure your lines end on the top portion of the second portion of the sheet.
- Swap your paper with another person. Begin drawing the body of the character without peeking at the top section.
- Continue the same step for the lower portion of the character drawing the feet and or lower level of the character.
Now it’s the real fun part. Open your sheet and you will find a very interesting character. For those individuals in character and object design (for my animation readers), this exercise can greatly help you explore inner creativity of developing a new never before thought of character.
This exercise helps boost creativity and imagination. Wondering what was drawn previous to what one is drawing helps create a higher level of stimulus. Many people often go behind humor, hoping their new idea for the body will compliment the head. Try this exercise with your team and be dazed at their newfound ways to explore ideas and concepts.
Happy Drawings!
Mitesh Solanki
If you liked that post, then try these...
Train Your Team to Become Creative
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Questions Bring Great Creative Results
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Mitesh…that is pure genius. Its a great way to get a collective idea without really thinking about the idea, except just trying to have fun.
Michaela
Wow, thanks for writing back a response to my email in your post. I tried it out with my team, and they just wanted to keep on trying new things. The ironic thing of all this was that we wanted to continue doing more and more rounds. And each time people would get inspired from the previous round.
We then tried this same technique in the context of engineering. It worked wonders on how we could innovate our system. We had to hack your idea of course to make it work, but naturally we made some tweaks to the system to make it work to our benefit. I guess you can say that we pumped our creative juice.
Looking forward to some more ideas…
-Crazy Reader
Crazy reader