Improve the creative dynamic in your teams

For a long time, creativity was only considered as an essential competency in a small number of occupations. Nowadays, whatever your activity, it has become indispensable to innovate regularly and, sometimes, to totally reinvent your approach: creativity is required almost everywhere. Yet how can you stimulate it within teams under constant pressure to achieve results, when going back to basics and reproducing what we know best often seems the best guarantee of efficiency?

Many experts insist on the importance of coaching our minds to open up to different points of view; in other terms, to know how to switch perspective to enrich our ideas. Yet we often neglect another equally essential aspect: a team’s co-construction dynamic from a rough idea. In fact, creative solutions rarely stem in one go from a single brain. Most often, they demand gradual teamwork to enrich and mature.

This approach is at the heart of an artistic discipline: collective improvisation theatre. The piece builds up in real time, thanks to the actors’ capacity to capture and enrich each other’s propositions. It is impossible to only push one’s ideas, else the show would transform into chaos: ”We are on a boat”—“No, I am in my kitchen”—“Is it an island I see over there?”—“Christ! My saucepan is overflowing!” The audience would quickly loose interest in such disconnected monologues. On the contrary, a successful show relies on the bond between the actors, on their aptitude to catch on the fly every clue suggested by a peer, and on their capacity to develop the creative idea that it prompted.

What can we learn from it in the professional environment? First, that this group dynamic, to be effective, requires real preparation to set up the right context and the right state of mind. And most importantly, that it can be worked at. It is through practice that the exchanges become more fluid and fruitful. You will discover here some advice to help your teams better build on each other’s ideas.

In this synopsis:
- Team creativity: beware of “good practices”!
- Get inspiration from theatrical improvisation techniques to reinforce creativity
- Practice becoming more creative as a team