Are you sitting at home telling yourself that you don’t have a creative bone in your body? You’re not alone. Only 10% of adults identify as creative, but 96% of four-year-olds do. As children, we use creativity to figure out how the world works. We learn how to paint, draw, play music, and build things, all while developing creative thinking activities and skills.
Creative thinking activities are key to problem-solving in all aspects of life, including your business. This is why creative team building activities are so important. Improving your and your team’s creative thinking will make you better problem solvers. It will lead to more innovation and productive risk-taking.
The Value of Creative Team Building for Enhanced Thinking
Being creative isn’t just about making art or writing a song. However, participating in a painting workshop or a songwriting program could be a helpful creative team building activity for your team. Creativity lives every time you solve a problem.
To solve a problem, you need to change something. To change something, you need new ideas. And to find ideas, you may think you need creative inspiration. But you don’t. As a lifelong songwriter, I can tell you that if I waited for inspiration to begin my work, I would’ve been out of work a long time ago. When I’m uninspired, I still go to work and know that if I stay with it long enough, the inspiration will eventually come.
Enter the need for creative thinking team building activities. There are programs that can help your team appreciate their inherent creativity and learn how to encourage innovative thinking in a team to harness that power to innovate and solve problems.
That Elusive Magic: A Step-By-Step Process for Group Creativity Exercises
When you break it down, a big part of thinking creatively is brainstorming to the point of exhausting every option you can possibly think of. Solving a problem in my business or songwriting a song has a lot of similarities. I start by bringing in lots of ideas. I don’t judge these ideas; I keep adding them to the conversation. We want to gather lots of information and perspectives before we start to judge the quality of our ideas or information. As possible solutions emerge, or possible song lyrics, it becomes more obvious to see which ideas stay relevant and fit where you’re going.
Songwriters, painters, writers, and other creatives use similar approaches in which we play with ideas and add and add before we begin to subtract as we move toward a solution to our problem. If you’re on a sales team, that solution could be a finished song or a new client intake form. While a song and a client intake form may seem worlds apart, they can both share a similar way of creating them. All of this assumes you’re thinking about creativity as an integral part of problem-solving. And that’s where creative team building can play an essential part in your business strategy, providing valuable group creativity exercises.
5 Team Building Games to Encourage Creativity
Here are a few of my favorite team programs to improve creative thinking and problem-solving. When led by a facilitator who can create context for you, you can gain confidence in your team’s creative abilities and better appreciate your power to ideate, brainstorm, kick things around, and ultimately be more innovative. These are fantastic team building games to encourage creativity.
1) Songwriting Team Building
Songwriting is problem-solving. You start with an empty page and ultimately turn that into a song lyric and then a finished song. Through a series of questions, you’ll develop song titles, themes, and ultimately tell your story through song. This step-by-step process mirrors what you need to do in your business life when tackling a new project or improving an existing process.
My company’s program focuses on creative team building through song. So yes, I’m a bit biased! But we’ve proven we can successfully bring innovative thinking to teams in a fun, highly engaging process. It’s one of the best creative thinking activities for teams.
2) Improv Programs: Engaging Creative Team Challenges
Improv is another great way to get your team working together in a creative fashion. Put them to the test by having them build upon a story from a random situation. It’s challenging at first, but once everyone gets into a rhythm, everyone starts to feed off of each other. It’s truly a team effort! These are excellent creative team challenges.
There are different forms of improv, but all easy to jump into. If you remember these 5 basic rules, you’re smooth sailing.
- Always say “yes, and”.
- Don’t ask open ended questions.
- Being funny isn’t a necessity.
- It’s a team effort, so work as a team.
- Tell a story!
3) Survivor Games: Creative Thinking Games in Action
I’m sure you’ve heard of the reality game show competition Survivor! This team building game to encourage creativity is based on that. You divide your group into smaller “tribes” and give them challenges to face.
Each challenge requires people to work together. You’ll be doomed if you don’t collaborate. The tasks can range from ridiculously silly to extremely difficult. Each game is designed to put everyone to the test, giving each individual their chance to shine. But most importantly, in the context of helping with creative thinking, there’s a lot of problem-solving and some trial and error to be successful. This type of program is best when you bring in a professional team facilitator, offering excellent creative thinking games.
4) Blind Drawing: Simple Yet Effective Creative Thinking Activities
If you’ve heard of back-to-back drawing, this creative team activity is similar. The game’s object is to attempt to draw only using verbal cues while blindfolded. Seems simple, right? You only need a flip chart, something to draw with, and your teammates.
To start, you can divide into smaller teams. Each team chooses one person to be the artist, and everyone else turns around to find an object to describe. The key is that the artist can’t see the object, and the teammates can’t see what the artist is drawing until the end.
Set a time limit and start drawing! After the time is up, see which team communicated their objective to the artist best. This program allows you to have fun and to do somewhat silly stuff without knowing how it will turn out. You can apply this to your next brainstorming session at work. Allow your team to try different ideas, to entertain silly ideas, and see where it takes you. It’s a great example of how to encourage creative thinking in a team through play.
5) Group Storytelling: Fostering Group Creativity Exercises
All you need for a storytelling session is time, a theme, and someone brave enough to go first. Sit around a table or pull chairs into a circle so no one feels pushed to the front or singled out. Make sure everyone is clear about the theme you’ve decided on. Have one person start the story and give them five minutes. Then have a second person continue the story for five minutes and pass it on to someone else. This is a fantastic group creativity exercise.
One of you will need to play the role of facilitator. The facilitator will interject every so often to ask the team if the story needs editing or refining. As this progresses, you’ll notice that while not perfect, your story is moving toward a conclusion. This forces you to use creativity, to problem-solve, and to succeed. Success is defined by a finished story, not necessarily how great it is. This will tune up your group brainstorming. This is one of my favorite examples of team building for creative thinking, and this one is DIY!
Get in touch to let us help you harness the power of creative thinking for your work team and see how performance improves.