Transform your team’s creativity

Turn your comms team into a creative powerhouse

Campaigns are getting harder to cut through the noise of everyday marketing as brands fight for our eyes and attention. Our guide will give you the information you need to get your team working more creatively to create memorable campaigns that make your audience tick.

Why would any organisation think about focusing on creativity?

Have we got your attention?

Now more than ever, we need our communications teams to be driving and supporting agendas that engage our audiences. There is fierce competition for everyone’s attention. Social media has a huge impact on individual attention spans. Customers, stakeholders, users and colleagues across a broad spectrum of interfaces are being bombarded with messages about their work, home and personal lives. Many of these are targeted via complex algorithms developed by organisations with enormous budgets to do so. This means for most of us, who are looking to develop campaigns, that we have to find ways to hit at the heart of local, national and, for many, global target audiences.

What’s the secret sauce of creativity?

We recognise that in order to keep up to date with market changes, social and technology improvements, competition forces and professional development, we need to make sure we invest time, have a supportive environment, provide opportunities and make sure creativity is at the forefront of our activities for all our teams.

In doing so, we also benefit from a creative thinking approach in all our activities. We embark on, not only our own and client campaigns with a creative eye, we apply the same thinking to all our work. For us, whether we are seeking to solve a particular problem, presenting financial statements at our Senior Leadership Team, updating our IT Systems, kitting out a new studio or refreshing our performance management system – all activities benefit from creative input.

Change your creative game up today

This guide will help you encourage and develop a more creative approach within your own team. The benefits will be something that will resonate across all your workstreams as long as you embed and role model creative thinking in all that you do. You will only be limited by your own constraints. There is always room for a more creative approach.

How do you start to encourage creativity within our teams?

There is some thinking that creativity is a natural attribute and is something that cannot be developed. Of course, there are individuals who we consider to be incredibly and naturally creative. These individuals can be found in the world of arts and industry alike. However, most of us need to think about how we can develop our creative thinking and what practical steps can help us to do that. Here are some ideas that might help you when thinking about your own and others’ development planning.

Our top five ideas for developing that creative muscle:

1. Spend time on creative thinking and practice

2. Stretch yourself out of your comfort zone

3. Research the professionals, the market and your competition

4. Collaborate with others and use them to bounce your ideas off

5. Pitch your ideas to gather feedback and encouragement

Spend time on creative thinking and practice

The most important thing you can do for yourself and the individuals around you is to block out time to enable you to develop your creativity. There are specific exercises you can do with an easy search on the web. All of these ideas will require time and, therefore, some priority in your working and personal schedule. The best way to do this is to start out with an audit of your current priorities and then making space for creative development. If you can, weave creativity into all you do. Make it your default setting in all projects and activities at home and at work. This way of thinking should enhance your current approach and therefore be more positive and engaging, not only for yourself but also for those around you.

Stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone

In order to make sure this becomes a priority for you, the first step should be identifying how changing your approach will benefit you. Once you have done this, you will be ready to take the first step into approaching things differently. Easy ways to do this will be making a change to your routine, not taking yourself too seriously, and perhaps more difficult, getting comfortable with discomfort. Not throwing yourself straight into the task or activity and giving yourself time to think creatively about the approach to take may well be something you are not used to.

Research the professionals, the market and your competition

Think about who you respect and admire creatively. They could work in design, music, food, arts, industry or our own communications industry. Do some research into how they generate, develop and implement ideas. Key attributes of creative thinkers tend to be: curiosity, attentiveness, having a wide range of interests and keeping up to date. It is always beneficial to look into what the market is doing and how your competition is approaching similar issues and agendas. This is all made so much easier via the internet. It is definitely a continuous process.

Collaborate with others and use them to bounce your ideas off

Great innovators have people around them to bounce and test creative ideas off. Bouncing ideas from inception through development is key to their success. Alongside this, it is equally important to be a valuable listener of others’ ideas. Don’t be afraid to approach someone for help with this. At Zero Above, we often bounce ideas off one another but also within our own networks. It can be scary at first, asking someone to listen to you – but we have found that not only are we happy to support each other, we often learn from each other in the process.

Pitch your ideas to gather feedback and encouragement

Finally, it is important to practice pitching your idea to others before the final presentation. It is an opportunity for you to grab people’s attention, share your passion and generate excitement and enthusiasm to take your idea forward. A normal pitch should be very short and punchy, and we think a 60-second slot should convey your thinking. In doing so, with trusted critics, you can gain valuable feedback to help hone your idea to the next level.

As above, it is important to be courageous, but you are not asking for lots of time, just the eyes and ears of an appropriate audience. Getting good feedback is a great way to develop your idea.

If you engage in these five ideas when embarking on your own or supporting others personal development planning for creativity, you will definitely see a change in how you approach activities going forward.

Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum. You will need to create a supportive environment in which you and others can grow and bring ideas to the table in a way that is different from the past.

What can you do to encourage a more creative way of doing things?

If you continue to work the way you have always worked, and that works for you, then absolutely fine. However, if you want to change your team’s approach and encourage more creativity, then it will be important to make some changes to the environment you are in.

These changes can take very different forms and will need some development of their own. You may be able to make only some of these, but changing nothing, as with anything, will change nothing!

Introduce creative opportunities

Think about current and future meeting agendas, and introduce time for creative thinking. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all meetings are now brainstorming events; however, giving individuals time to bring ideas together and changing current meeting structures can help with bringing different ideas to the table. You can rotate meeting owners, make sure you reference creativity in all that you do and celebrate new and innovative ideas.

Identify team profiles

You will definitely find it helpful to identify any team traits or tendencies that might keep innovation within a particular style or culture. Undertaking a simple online diagnostic tool linked to creativity, Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is one that will help ensure that teamthink is addressed. There are many free downloadable online tests available. Share your findings with the team and work together to ensure balance across projects and campaigns.

Encourage team and individual working and thinking

When setting individual and team goals, it is important to include creativity as a core component of all these. Find out about what people get excited about when creating. Often, someone who seems to be struggling with creativity at work can turn out to be ultra-creative outside of work. The skills applied are the same. It is just a matter of having the right environment in which to apply them.

Think about the physical environment

This can be a challenge, but stepping away from the normal work environment can really help change. As many of us move into a more hybrid work environment, it is important to think about how we can get together to generate energy and encouragement for one another. This can be done to some extent via online meeting platforms, but if there is an opportunity to get together face to face every so often, this can be really helpful. If your working environment is desk-based, taking a step away into a shared meeting space away from computers, phones and laptops can also help generate a more collaborative and dynamic environment.

Review what is different

Having done all of this, it is important to regularly check in and see what difference a more creative focus has made. You may see feedback on more successful projects and campaigns, and some may feedback that they enjoy this new way of working more than the previous way. Others may feel a positive knock on effect to other aspects of their work and life. Make sure you schedule regular reviews and check-ins so you can identify benefits and celebrate successes!

In order to establish a more creative approach by implementing some of these ideas, you may want to run a short session to showcase a rationale for change.

On the following page is an outline of such a session that we at Zero Above have delivered successfully. Feedback has been positive at an individual and organisational level, with benefits being felt both professionally and personally.

Developing your team’s creativity: A workshop outline

Pre-work activities

All attendees fill in an online questionnaire to establish an overall team profile of traits. All attendees send in a picture of something that has resonated with them creatively in recent months. The facilitator compiles an overall team profile and uploads everyone’s images in advance of the session.

Introduction

This will be the usual housekeeping and course objectives, alongside a summary of job role, results of the online test and expectations of the session from individual attendees.

Team profile

Time to share the overall team profile, discuss any surprises and any need to draw in particular traits that may be missing.

Why change?

A general discussion on why everyone believes that this session is being run and why there is a need for change.

Sharing our creative inspirations

Time to share the slide or slides (depending on how many attend – 10 is about the maximum for a session like this). Get everyone in turn to share why they shared their image and what in particular resonated with them.

Creativity and context

This session is an opportunity to reflect on the diversity of creative inspirations and how to harness that within the particular context in which they are working. That may be an environment with particular political, cultural, financial, successful or unsuccessful factors surrounding it.

Developing individual creative thinking

An opportunity to focus on developing individual creative skills with a particular focus on:

1. Spend time on creative thinking and practice [Discussion]

2. Stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone [Creative Exercise – 25 circles]

3. Research the professionals, the market and your competition

4. [In smaller groups, discuss who you consider to be a creative master and why.]

5. Collaborate with others and use them bounce your ideas off

6. [In pairs, establish what environment would enable this to be more possible and who you might do this with inside work, within your network or at home]

7. Pitch your ideas to gather feedback and encouragement

8. [Each attendee spends five minutes preparing a one-minute pitch for either a work project or personal passion. All then share their pitch with fellow attendees].

Imagine a new world

A general discussion on the benefits of working with a more creative and collaborative approach. Group to share their thoughts.

Embedding change

Now it is time to signpost the next steps. Give everyone an opportunity to share their ideas for change (either in the workshop setting or as a follow-up afterwards). Then, taking on board some or all of the ideas here and very likely others that either you or the team have come up with, start to implement changes and embed creativity as a core element in all activities.

Signpost reviews

Make sure that everyone knows that reviews will be in place to make sure that there are benefits to the change and that continued development around creativity will now be part of everyone’s development.

Learning Checks

As a sign-off, ask everyone for their key learning point for the session.

25 Circles Exercise

Sometimes going for quantity over quality can help creativity flow. The aim of this exercise is to fill in the 25 circles in three minutes. Focus on quantity, not quality. If you are stuck, choose 25 faces, 25 monsters, 25 flowers, etc. Then you can use this technique to come up with 25 logos, 25 straplines or 25 anything you need to focus on. As you don’t need to agonise over each one, it can help build your creative muscle, and you may get a few good ideas you can build on.

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