I . Creativity and innovation in Youth NGOs

How can you unleash the creative capacity of your team to innovate your programs and campaigns?
How can I choose the appropriate brainstorming method and facilitate it within my team?
How can I generate innovative solutions?

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterized by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions.

Creativity involves two processes: thinking and producing.

Creativity is a combinatorial force: it’s our ability to tap into our ‘inner’ pool of resources knowledge, insight, information, inspiration and all the fragments populating our minds – that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a way of thinking.

You can learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using your imagination, and synthesizing information.

Brainstorming is a method used to generate ideas to solve clearly defined design problems. In controlled conditions and a free-thinking environment, teams approach a problem by such means as “How Might We” questions. They produce a vast array of ideas and draw links between them to find potential solutions.

Collective intelligence can be understood as the enhanced capacity that is created when people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilize a wider range of information, ideas, and insights. Collective intelligence (CI) emerges when these contributions are combined to become more than the sum of their parts for purposes ranging from learning and innovation to decision-making.

1.     Innovation is first about your talent, the creative capacity of the team members and the trust between them, and less about the process or the system.

2.     Space and time. Offer to your team members the time and the context to activate their imagination and creativity. For instance, Apple have a work policy that encourage the employees to use up to one fifth part of their time for creativity sessions, while Google officially encourages their employees to develop a habit and invest 20% of their time to prototype new products and services.

3.     Team diversity. Encourage your colleagues to collaborate and brainstorm with colleagues from different departments, with different expertise. Let them know that the continuous contribution of everyone is expected and valuable. Bring people from different expertise area, add the challenge on the table, select one brainstorming method and let the magic happen.

4.     Psychological safety. The greatest ideas will emerge when the team members feel comfortable and safe to share their thoughts, when they feel listened. One good start to do that is to replace „Yes, and..” instead of „Yes, but…”. The first expression allows people to grow an idea together, while the second dismiss it and shows its weak points.

5.     Switch your mindset with parallel thinking. Allow your team to see things from a different perspective through 6 thinking hats approach proposed by Edward de Bono, which will turn the rational into creative, the defensive into the pro-active.

6.     Create a common space for creative thinking in the company. Only 10% of the great ideas emerge in the office space, therefore a whiteboard, colorful markers, and sticky notes placed in an accessible area might be a simple way to invite them to propose their dilemmas and ideas during the day.

7.     Creativity marathon can be proposed to your team periodically. Offer them clear briefs and 2-3 weeks to prepare and come up with new concepts, proposals, and presentations through a pitch.

8.     Where is my moment for thought? Put down your to-do list, step away from your desk, turn off your podcasts on your commute. Have a moment every day where you’re trying to achieve nothing. Giving your brain a moment to relax might lead to your best idea yet.

9.     Have fun and be playful. The creative processes shouldn’t’t be a about a group of people sitting around a table and generating ideas.  You can spice things up with energizers, ice breakers, short and intense creativity activities, or you can even create your own ritual like a funny dance. This will help the team members feel the psychological safety and playfulness.

Every brainstorming process should be prepared in advance. To warm up the creative energy of your team members, you can propose them one of the following creativity boosters:

Three things

Divide the team into pairs, each person facing the other. In each pair, one person asks the other: “Name three things that…” followed by the first thing that comes into their mind. The other comes up with three answers as quickly as possible. Switch roles and repeat at least ten times during a five-minute period. For example, if I say: “Name three things that are yellow,” you must tell me the first yellow things that come to mind, without overthinking and worrying about right or wrong answers. Just respond as fast as you can!

Object jam

Bring a random object into the brainstorm and give the team five minutes to come up with alternative uses for it, perhaps if it were bigger or smaller. I use a lot in my trainings 20 ways to use a spoon activity and it’s funny and a great idea generator tool. Ok, I admit, almost every time. I simply love it.

Round table story

The team members stand in a circle. You will inform them that you are going to build together a story and everyone contribution and creativity is expected. You can say the first sentence of a story, then ask each team member to continue it one sentence at a time. A great start could be “This morning I have seen a unicorn driving a convertible car.” This should last a maximum of ten minutes, but people will connect both to the story, to the group and they will enter in a playful, imaginative mindset.

Either if you are trying to find a catchy title for you fundraising campaign, to come up with a new product or service to support your beneficiaries, or to plan a communication campaign, an efficient brainstorming session will help you achieve your objectives and find the answers at a faster pace.Irrespective of the chosen brainstorming method you choose to apply within your team, there are 4 essential principles for great ideation sessions that you should consider.

1. Quality through quantity

The quality and effectiveness of the ideas partly depends on their quantity. The more you generate, the greater the chance of coming up with good ones.

2. Refrain from judging ideas

Criticism should not hinder the creative process and the generation of bold ideas. Focus on producing and developing them and leave the evaluation to later.

3. Be bold

New ideas and perspectives lead to innovative solutions, so embrace them with-out letting criticism break the flow.

4. Combine and develop ideas

Brainstorming should be a 100 percent collaborative process. Any member of the team can combine, adapt, and transform ideas, and split them into many others.

To assist you in the process, we recommend you an efficient method we have used in ideation processes all over the world: Lotus Blossom

The lotus blossom diagram is an analytical tool which can be used to brainstorm and organize ideas in a thematic manner.

The lotus blossom diagram can help you:

• Organize ideas and broaden thinking by providing alternative possibilities
• Explore a subject, problem, or idea
• Provide a visual representation and a mental model

1. Write the central problem, issue, or idea in the center of the diagram. (See the form and examples on the following pages.) 

2. Write the significant themes or components of your subject in the boxes labeled A to H surrounding the central theme. The optimal number of themes for a manageable diagram is between six and eight. If you have more than eight, make additional diagrams. Ask questions like: What are my specific objectives? What are the constants in my problem? If my subject were a book, what would the chapter headings be? What are the dimensions of my problem?

3. Use the ideas written in the boxes as the central themes for the surrounding lotus blossom petals or boxes. Thus, the item written in box A would become the central theme for the lower middle box A and becomes the basis for generating eight more ideas or applications.

4. Continue the process until the lotus blossom diagram is complete.

5. You should now be able to use this information to develop an action plan to respond to the central issue.  Not all ideas or applications will need to be used, so you should spend time as a group to think about what is feasible and practical given your time frame, resources, and the urgency of the issue.

This method is great to plan communication campaigns, new project ideas, or fundraising campaigns.

According to Graham Wallas (The Art of Thought), there are four phases of the creative process:

1.     Preparation – you consciously direct attention to a certain topic

2.     Incubation – you conscious work stops but unconscious creative process continues

3.     Illumination – the moment when new ideas suddenly come to mind; work done during preparation turns into concrete ideas

4.     Verification – you conscious thinking is back again, and you decide if the idea is valuable

As the leader of your team, your role is to support both social processes and cognitive processes associated to innovation.

Social processes involve coordination and collaboration, trust, psychological safety, support, communication, shared mental models, performance, and system monitoring

Cognitive processes involve problem identification, idea generation, idea construction, idea evaluation and selection, implementation planning.

Design thinking is: 

·       A Framework to innovate and think differently.

·       Ideology: When solving problems pragmatically, multidisciplinary and with focus on the user, you achieve innovation

·       A Process: to solve complex problems and innovate supported by certain tools inspired from designers’ practice

· A Practice: the activity of designing a solution/product/service by studying and learning from the experiences and practices of end-users and stakeholders, articulating problems, and solving for them

1.     Empathize – Understand the challenge and the reality of the users/beneficiaries/donors from their perspective.

Tools available:

•   Context review
•   Stakeholder Mapping
•   Landscape Mapping
•   Job to be done – Value Proposition Canvas,
•   Experts interviews
•   Observation
•   Shadowing

2.     Define – seek meaning, connections, patterns, opportunities, reframe the problem.

Tools available:

•  Persona
•  Empathy Map
•  Point of View
•  User Journey

3.     Ideate – we generate ideas and develop new concepts

Tools available:

•   Ideation
•  Concept development

4.     Prototype – We bring ideas to life. We create a physical artefact or/and an experience that the user can interact with

Tools available:

•  Service scenario
•  Storyboarding
•  Storytelling
•  Business Origami
•  Role playing
•  Lego etc.

5.     Test – We test the prototypes with real users, and we learn from the feedback.