Ok, so you have identified the need to innovate within your business or organisation, but where on earth do you start? Or perhaps you already have started, but you have hit a plateau and need to ramp things up again? Whatever the case, here are five simple ways you can inspire your team – and yourself – to innovate.

First of all, make it challenging. No one ever came up with a great idea from being given a really simple task. Easy and straightforward tasks do not breed creativity. Likewise, when people are stressed and tearing their hair out, it is not likely to will come up with any great ideas. Make sure that both you and your team feel significantly challenged by the problems and projects you are working on. When humans feel challenged they naturally like to solve these challenges, and when an easy answer does not immediately present itself, that is our moment for our creativity to shine.

Second of all, give people a sense of progress. Research employee motivation and engagement and learn how these impact on innovation and performance. A recent study revealed that the majority of managers wrongly believe 'recognition for good work' (either public or private) to be the most important factor. However, the most important factor was revealed to be 'progress'. The study revealed that making progress was most frequently associated with high motivation, positive emotions and innovation, more so than any other workday event. Managers should therefore ensure that they are provide goals that enable progress to be made and acknowledged. As individuals, we should also set ourselves small goals that we can work and progress towards.

Thirdly, provide autonomy. As a manager, it is incredibly tempting to tell people how to get from A to B, however, this temptation must be resisted as it completely kills innovation. If you simply tell people how to solve problems, they will lack the motivation to come up with better solutions themselves. Instead, ensure people are clear on the problem that has to be solved, and give them the room to explore how they can get from A to B. When people have autonomy and flexibility, they come up with significantly more innovative solutions.

Fourth, you must encourage assumption crushing. Think about whenever you are faced with a problem to solve, there is always a bunch of assumptions sitting in the back of your head. These relate to things you automatically assume to be true about the problem, however, the bad thing about these assumptions is that they effectively put up a fence in our brain that limits thinking from moving beyond that point. Inspire people to come up with more innovative solutions to problems by identifying and then crushing the assumptions they have by asking themselves, “What if the opposite was true?” By asking this question of every assumption they make, they will get to some very inventive solutions.

Finally, provide clear problems and opportunities for people to solve. This might sound a bit obvious, but few organisations do this well in regards to innovation. Asking people to submit any old idea into a suggestion box will result in a stack of ideas that are completely off strategy. To ensure time spent on innovation and idea generation is as productive and efficient as possible, make sure you spend time defining the key problems and opportunities that you want your team to innovate around. This means that the ideas you receive will complement the overall business strategy.

Most of us have been a victim of groupthink at some stage in our working lives. If you have been sitting with the same team for the past year, you’ve probably also become a victim of ‘team-think’.

This happens a lot in companies that deal with similar problems for their various clients. I work with several advertising and media agencies and often the key issue for many of their clients is generating awareness for their products. When the agency tries to generate ideas on how to do this, the strategies tend to revolve around the same few media channels, such as TV, print and outdoor campaigns, or creating a viral video and posting it on YouTube.

Research suggests that teams which have been together for a while develop a set of entrenched assumptions, ways of doing things and set patterns of behaviour. The good news is there is a cure: introducing a new member to the team. Studies show that when a new member joins a team, existing assumptions, attitudes and behaviours are far less likely to be activated. The new person triggers new thoughts and behaviours.

While it can be tempting to leave harmonious teams alone, rotating employees around to different teams regularly, say every 6–8 months, can considerably enhance creativity.

When I run idea-generation sessions for clients, I almost always insist they invite people who do not work for their company. I encourage them to include as diverse a mix of people as possible. For example, in one workshop for a national postal services organisation, we had the artistic director of a circus troupe, a creative director from an advertising agency, an 18-year-old university student and a TV host. Needless to say, the ideas generated in the workshop were wonderfully varied.


So, rather than try to think creatively on your own, try to partner up with someone you don’t normally work with. Use them as a springboard for fleshing out your ideas and let them go in directions you wouldn’t if you were working on your own. Most importantly, listen to their input and be open to going in directions you would not normally.

Letting your mind wander wherever it needs to, starting with a blank canvas and being free of rules are all considered conducive to creativity. However, the latest psychological research has shown the complete opposite.

In one study, a group of adults was asked to make a construction using Lego. One group was given no constraints; they were told that they could build whatever they liked. The other group had several constraints placed upon them; they were told that their construction must contain no right-angled joints and they could only use one kind of brick.

The constructions built by the ‘constraints’ group were judged to be significantly more creative and lateral than those in the ‘free expression’ group.

So why does this happen? When completing tasks, we typically draw on what we know rather than seeking new ideas and opinions. Often, information retrieval becomes automated in our brains because it is useful and saves us having to come up with new solutions every time we face a problem. In other words, when we are assigned a task to complete, our brains switch into autopilot if it is a familiar problem.

However, this autopilot mode dramatically impairs performance when we have to think of completely novel ideas. Constraining the way we think forces us to search for new and creative ways of completing the task or solving the problem. In a paradoxical way, putting constraints on our tasks lifts the constraints on our thought processing.

Here are a couple of tips to help apply these findings:
-    Try to avoid taking on tasks that are open-ended and overly broad. If you find yourself in this situation, challenge yourself to apply a constraint to the task to make yourself perform more creatively.
-    Whenever you feel yourself going into autopilot, ask your boss to apply a constraint to the task (or do it yourself).

Our emotional state has a big impact on our ability to think creatively. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University conducted a study which examined the impact of happy and sad moods on idea generation. To put them into the required mood, participants were first asked to describe a recent life event that made them feel happy or sad. Following the mood manipulation, participants were asked to write down as many things they could think of that could fly. On average, participants in the happy group came up with almost 50% more ideas than the sad group.

The happiness hypothesis was also explored by Teresa Amabile at Harvard University. Amabile asked several hundred people to keep a work diary that detailed their daily activities, moods and other workplace events. An analysis of these diary entries showed that people were more likely to come up with breakthrough ideas when they were feeling happy, even if this happiness was experienced the day before the idea was generated.

When we are happy, the level of a brain chemical called dopamine increases. In the frontal lobe, dopamine controls the flow of information to other parts of the brain. When people feel happy, thoughts or images of one concept – such as ‘thick’ – activate thoughts or images of many other concepts – such as ‘paint’, ‘stupid’ or ‘make-up’. Opening up connections between concepts that are only remotely associated with one another increases our ability for divergent thinking. In contrast, when people feel sad, they become more detail-oriented with their thinking which means that they often will not see the greater possibilities. In other words, they get focused on the trees to the exclusion of the forest.

So if you are feeling a bit flat, chances are you are probably not performing at your peak creativity. The common image of the ‘tortured genius’ has fed the popular belief that the majority of creative geniuses were depressed and emotionally unbalanced. However, studies have shown that people are actually more creative when they are happy. 

For those of us who exercise regularly, doing a big workout without a warm-up seems silly. Our risk of injury increases dramatically and it also makes it hard for us to perform at our best. Similarly, it is critical to warm up your brain before engaging it in a creative-thinking workout. This is to combat the fact that in general, most idea-generation and problem-solving meetings are scheduled immediately after a strategy or finance meeting, in which your brain was most likely in analytical or linear gear.

Most of us can appreciate how difficult it is to come from a meeting that requires analytical, rational thinking into a meeting that requires us to think laterally (that is, thinking outside of our usual frame of reference). When your brain has been in linear thinking mode, coming up with creative solutions is very difficult. The brain naturally wants to jump to logical solutions, given the mode it is in, and finding lateral and creative solutions becomes unnecessarily difficult.

Scientific research suggests that warming up the creative-thinking parts of your brain will help you perform more effectively and efficiently at creative tasks. These exercises will make it easier to jump from a finance meeting to an idea-generation meeting. Warming up this part of your brain only takes a few minutes to shift your brain into an open-minded and lateral-thinking mode.

There are many ways to warm up you brain to this type of thinking. One is an Inventium tool called Fat Chance. Fat Chance was designed with the specific purpose of warming up the creative-thinking parts of people’s brains. The tool can be used before 30-minute idea-generation and problem-solving workshops or one-day blue-sky thinking workshops in which brains need to think laterally for an entire day.

Fat Chance requires no materials or stimuli other than one thing: an impossible challenge. For example, cure cancer by tomorrow lunchtime. There are two key elements to creating an impossible challenge. The first is to pick a goal or an objective that is almost impossible to achieve with technology as we know it today. The second is to add an incredibly tight time frame. The tighter the better. For example, Raise Paris Hilton’s IQ by 100 points by the end of the week. Give birth to an alien by dinner tonight. Marry Brad Pitt by noon tomorrow.

After you have developed an impossible challenge, the next step is to divide the participants into pairs or groups of three. This gives everyone a good chance to participate. Once groups are assigned, instruct people to generate at least three solutions to the problem in five minutes. Encourage those who are finding it difficult and remind them that the solutions do not have to be logical or rational – in fact, those solutions won’t actually solve the problem. After these five minutes have passed, you can feel confident that the divergent thinking parts of people’s brains will be sufficiently warmed up.

Why does this tool work so effectively? It all comes back to the impossibility of the challenge. Given that it is impossible, non-creative thinking will not lead to a solution. The problem can only be solved through taking a leap and thinking very creatively and laterally. For example, in relation to the Paris Hilton problem, some solutions might include bribing the instructor for the answers, making the IQ test about fashion rather than general knowledge, or finding another person named Paris Hilton who happens to be very smart. Despite the ‘craziness’ of these problems and answers, groups have then gone on to generate innovative solutions to real life problems they were facing.

In general, the left side of our brain directs our logical and rule-based decisions; similar perhaps to a stern headmaster. On the other hand, the right side tends to be more inventive and intuitive. Research out of New Jersey has gone a step further and found a way to maximise both the left and right brain hemispheres, leading to highly practical and highly creative ideas.

The researchers got their participants to complete a standard creativity test then split the participants into two groups. One group was instructed to follow a target that moved from left to right for 30 seconds, while the second group looked straight ahead for the same time.

The participants then completed the same creative idea generation test. Keeping in mind that the participants shared comparable creativity before being split into groups, the participants who followed the moving target were much more creative than those who stared at the wall.

The researchers concluded that moving your eyes from side-to-side increases the communication between the left and right side of the brain, thus resulting in more useful and creative ideas.

So if your brain is still recovering from the weekend and you need a kick start, get those eyes dancing from side-to-side and feel your brain sing.

Assumptions are one of the biggest creativity killers in organisations of all sizes. Those nasty things that sit around in the back of your head and stop your thinking going anywhere interesting. Chances are, if you have a problem you are trying to crack, you hold a whole lot of assumptions or pre-conceived notions that are boxing in your thinking.

For example, if you run a services business and you want to grow it, one assumption that you may be making is that to make money, you actually have to be working – given that’s how services work. You provide something and your client pays you. But this old-fashioned business model means that to increase profit, you need to work harder or pay more people to work harder on your behalf. A very limiting assumption.

So something I always bang on about to people is to actively challenge and crush any assumptions that they can identify.

In relation to the above example, I would recommend crushing the above assumption that to grow the business, you need to work more. What if you flipped the assumption on its head and instead, asked yourself, ‘How can I make money while I sleep?’ This may sounds a bit crazy for any accountants and lawyers reading this post, but imagine the possibilities if you could create automated ways of doing the work for you. Deloitte Digital is a beautiful example of this crushed assumption in practice.

On the products side of things, I recently came across a nifty example of some assumption crushing in relation to vending machines. If you were to think about creating a vending machine, one assumption may be that it needs to be about one metre wide and around two metres tall – sort of like the ones we are constantly surrounded by at airports and office buildings. But not the examples I came across in Tokyo and Strasbourg – they crushed those ’size’ assumptions and came up with something completely different.

The folk in Strasbourg decided to crush the standard dimensions and created a monster vending machine that has more in common with a small convenience store than a garden variety vending machine.

A UNIQLO store in Tokyo threw that assumption out the window and created a machine that was an entire store! No need for overheads such as retail staff when it is all a self-serve vending machine.

So what are some assumptions you hold onto in relation to problems you are tackling for your business? What are the things that you take for granted and would never think of challenging? Or have you recently crushed some assumptions to help you generate breakthrough solutions to problems?

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