How do you get your team out of a creative rut?
What is a creative rut?
A creative rut is a state of feeling bored, frustrated and lacking new stellar ideas. It is when your creativity takes a nose dive. This is often the result of not being stretched or challenged. Frankly speaking, all of us have been there.
Creativity goes hand in hand with problem-solving, identifying opportunities, coming up with new ideas among other very vital traits in today's fast-moving and competitive work environment.
How do you help you or your team get out of a creative rut?
- Change your daily routine
Routines often tend to be boring after some period of time. Introducing a far from normal way of doing things can spark creativity. Adjust your environment to inspire creativity for instance by including visual reminders. This will broaden your creative spectrum.
- Identify and fix any obvious problems
Observe what’s going on and ask other people’s opinions. Think about the time and place when your team has been most creative in the past. Can you recreate that environment or group dynamic? Find out how your team shares ideas, and how open teammates are to others. Alternatively, you could explore ideas raised in the past and see if any is worth resuscitating.
- Schedule brainstorming dates
Having brainstorming dates with you and your team are highly recommended. It opens up your mind to explore any ideas hanging in the abyss. It pushes everyone to be more creative.
- Bring in different points of view
Create opportunities to expose your team to different perspectives and points of view. You can tour the offices of organizations in different industries or bringing employees from other parts of your business to regularly benchmark ideas with your team. Your employees ought to interact with people who think differently; have different skills and mindsets.
Don’t sit and watch as your team goes stale. These four tips are sure to get you and your team’s creative juices flowing. Which other way can you use to get your team out of a creative rut?