I love working with clients who value the creative process. I always learn a few new ways to brainstorm on bringing new, innovative ideas to the marketplace. But not everyone enjoys their company’s brainstorming sessions. I cover a lot of this in the book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue: Overcoming the Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success.
Over on the Heart of Innovation site, the authors offer 25 ways companies and participants often kill the creative process, and I thought I’d share. Do any of these sound familiar to you? Do you have any ideas on how you can turn things around to get the creative flow flowing again?
1. Lame facilitation
2. Wrong problem statement
3. Unmotivated participants
4. Hidden (or competing) agendas
5. Insufficient diversity of participants
6. Addiction to the status quo
7. Lack of clear ground rules
8. Sterile meeting space
9. No transition from “business as usual”
10. Lack of robust participation
11. The extroverts take over
12. Habitual idea killing
13. Attachment to pet ideas
14. Discomfort with ambiguity
15. Hyper-seriousness
16. Endless interruptions
17. People come late and leave early
18. Premature adoption of the first “right idea”
19. Group think
20. Hierarchy, turfs, and competing sub-groups
21. Imbalance of divergent and convergent thinking
22. No tools or techniques to spark creativity
23. Inadequate idea capture methods
24. Premature evaluation
25. No real closure or next step