Today is World Creativity & Innovation Day 🧠

While writing my book, Creativity at Work I looked at the tools that were commonly used to boost creativity. One of these was brainstorming.

When it comes to brainstorming, there are 4 guidelines

1 – Focus on quantity. The assumption is that the more ideas generated, the greater the chance of producing an effective, different solution.

2 – No criticism. Focus on extending or adding to ideas rather than criticising. By suspending judgement, participants will feel free to come up with more ‘off the wall’ ideas.

3 – Reward unusual ideas. To get a long list of ideas, unusual ideas should be welcomed. New ways of thinking can provide better solutions.

4 – Combine & improve ideas. Good ideas may be combined to form a single, even better, idea. This process is often called ‘piggybacking’ as group members add to others’ ideas as they are written down.

The main brainstorming propositions are that everyone can be involved and it should be fun, creating energy to generate new concepts and solutions.

What do you do to boost creativity?