Class #9 – Creativity under Pressure – Reflect on your experience in class today.
It’s a bit late so I’m going to keep this very concise. Main takeaways:
- When under a time pressure have a blue hat/moderator keeping you on task (and lying about the remaining time if necessary).
- Make a plan and structure and try to stick to it (10 mins to brainstorm, 10 mins to question assumptions…etc).
- Have a relationship with your team beforehand so that everyone has a general sense of how everyone else works (and to help avoid misunderstandings/hurt feelings).
- Don’t try to reach perfect consensus, even in small groups. Take a quick vote and move on.
- Spend time crafting a quality pitch. Great ideas aren’t very useful if they can’t be communicated. This was the hardest part of the day in my opinion. I really liked our idea but I don’t think we did a great job of getting it across to the class…even though we practiced for a few minutes…hmm…
- I find it very challenging personally to be fully involved in the creative process and to be self-aware at the same time. Am I interrupting too much? Was that too much blue hat or did we really need that since we only have 10 minutes left?… etc
- And finally….
- If you’re going to present the exact same idea as another group, go first so it looks like they stole your idea and not the other way around (jk).
I wanted to take a step back from the creativity under-pressure-angel since that’s been well covered by now. In this scenario, all 8 teams worked from the same problem statement and came up with a few (but not 8) distinct ideas. What’s next? We voted with coins (which should have been chocolate coins btw…) and made a ranking of the ideas…but what would we have really done if we were consulting Hallmark? Should everyone have voted? How do you get Team 4 to buy into Team 2’s winning idea? How do you incorporate ideas from Team 4 into Team 2’s idea?