You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking.
This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!
A questioning method for generating, explaining, investigating ideas.
The SWOT Analysis is a long-standing technique of looking at what we have, with respect to the desired end state, as well as what we could improve on. It gives us an opportunity to gauge approaching opportunities and dangers, and assess the seriousness of the conditions that affect our future. When we understand those conditions, we can influence what comes next.
Use a remote-friendly version of the classic note and vote exercise to generate ideas quickly, vote on the most suitable, and turn them into how might we statements your group can move forward with!
By using the metaphor of a sailboat, teams can articulate what is working well and also, what is holding the organization back. Individually think about and note down:
What is moving us forward and What is Holding us back in as an organization or team.
Moving us forward: what's working for us, what's really good.
Holding us back: what challenges are we facing?
When people must tackle a common complex challenge, you can release their inherent creativity and leadership as well as their capacity to self-organize.
Open Space makes it possible to include everybody in constructing agendas and addressing issues that are important to them. Having co-created the agenda and free to follow their passion, people will take responsibility very quickly for solving problems and moving into action. Letting go of central control (i.e., the agenda and assignments) and putting it in the hands of all the participants generates commitment, action, innovation, and follow-through. You can use Open Space with groups as large as a couple of thousand people!
A fast and loud method to enhance brainstorming within a team. Since this activity has more than round ideas that are repetitive can be ruled out leaving more creative and innovative answers to the challenge.
A process to help identify and understand the origins of problems, issues or observations.
Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don’t like about your product/service or what’s standing in the way of a desired goal.
Using the Social Process Triangles created by the Institute of Cultural Affairs to identify a broad range of issues faced by a community, followed by the Consensus Workshop Method to see larger patterns of issues.
You can improve any solution by objectively reviewing its strengths and weaknesses and making suitable adjustments. In this creativity framegame, you improve the solutions to several problems. To maintain objective detachment, you deal with a different problem during each of six rounds and assume different roles (problem owner, consultant, basher, booster, enhancer, and evaluator) during each round. At the conclusion of the activity, each player ends up with two solutions to her problem.
The premise of this game, therefore, is to disclose and discover unknown information that can impact organizational and group success in any area of the company—management, planning, team performance, and so forth.