How Serious Play With Legos Can Help You Innovate
Want to innovate like a true professional leader at your agency? You might have to act like you’re 6 years old again.
Posts Tagged: creativity
Is a “Standing” Meeting the Key to Team Creativity?
The next time you’re tasked with coordinating a team meeting to come up with the next big creative innovative idea for your agency, remove all of the chairs from the room.
3 Online Tools to Bring Out the Designer in You
Time is of the essence and I’ve found the following tools really useful in helping me tell visual stories without the hassle of complicated software.
Everyone designs!
Herbert Simon once said “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Before hearing that statement, I had a very narrow view of design. I thought design was for creative types or artists who made shoes, furniture or cool new technology products. I didn’t realize that design encompassesRead… Read more »
Building Your Own Creative Space at Work
While there are many aspects of my detail to The Innovation Lab at the Office of Personnel Management that I enjoy, one of my favorites is access to the Lab’s space in the sub-basement of OPM’s Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building. The space is a dream for those seeking a creative and collaborative work environment. ForRead… Read more »
How to Spark Innovation at Your Agency
Quick, be creative! For most people, this is a tall order. Thinking creatively on-demand is not an easy task; in fact, it can be outright intimidating. But, according to four experts in the field, it’s also probably not a necessary one for innovation. Results from OPM’s 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey indicated that nearly 91Read… Read more »
Do You Have to Be Creative to Tell a Story? (Answer: No)
In the heat of frenzied media coverage, problems aren’t the only newsworthy topic out there. Somewhere in the underbrush, there’s a story about solutions or people working on solutions. There’s no need to wait for an enterprising reporter to dredge that story up — we can help them find it.
Tools of the Trade: Part 2
You can read part 1 of this blog series here. Once you’ve generated your ideas, the next step is to evaluate them and select an idea/s to take forward for further development. 1. Put ideas and solutions to the test Force field analysis. Draw a line down the middle of the page and put the ideaRead… Read more »
Some Tools of the Trade: Part 1
My team helps support creative practice in the Scottish Government: encouraging and equipping staff to come forward with, and implement, ideas that will improve our corporate systems and our policy making. Sometimes what we do can seem a bit like magic. We come in, sprinkle a bit of fairy dust over a problem and ‘hey presto’,Read… Read more »
Measuring Creativity: Part Two
Last week we looked at indicators that might be measured in relation to factors that can foster creativity and innovation in organisations. In this post we’ll consider possible measures of creative activity and the outcomes of creativity. Creative activity The measurement of creativity itself is arguably about monitoring ideas that are generated. This can beRead… Read more »