Workday #2 - Exploring Theme

For this work day we moved again and this time we were in a room in kåren, empty but with a platform suggesting that usually it must be a theater.  The main task of this work day was to explore a given theme through different tools. We were given the topic “Idea flows and creativity between people” to work on.

The first task was to develop ideas related to the topic by drawing a tree. First, we started to discuss the topic but our ideas being limited, we decided to open our mind with internet and luckily we found an interesting article regarding idea development and human creativity management, skimming through the article, we extracted some key words. 

We found some really good points to place as big branches for our tree, including Exploring, Communication, Diversity, Spreading, Combining and Anticipation. Also, we noticed in the text that Evaluation and Elimination are other important words linking the above main points together. We placed those two in the picture as the air surrounding the whole tree. Some fruits were also drawn to symbolize innovation gained by effective idea flows and people’s creativity management. This task was really useful to help us to figure out all the ideas we have about the subject. We were first a bit skeptical because we didn't got from the beginning the goal of this tree but it became more clear when we start the second task. Taking this into account, next time we will certainly manage this tree better. Regardless to that we can quickly see the limits of this tool that´s why, this tree worked well as a warm-up for the assignments that we got to discuss widely about the theme but it seems difficult to use it alone to create innovation or even figure out new ideas.

After the tree-drawing exercise, we had a short break and we started playing “sculpture game”, in which, we had to form small  group of two or three and help each other forming shapes of the a ballet dancer and ice-hockey player. It was funny, and it helps also to awaken our imagination. 

Then we came back to the main task and in the next activity we were supposed to apply one of the two new tools we have chosen during the week, thus, we applied the Lotus Blossom.  According to the description we made in a previous article (http://supervision58h.blogspot.fi/2015/03/this-week-we-decided-to-present-two-new.html), we tried first to bring out eight main ideas linked to our theme i.e.  “Idea flows and creativity between people. Pursuant to Joachim suggestion about the importance to let the ideas going before starting to analyze them ; we gave each member about 5 minutes to write down her/his thoughts on sticker notes. After that, each of us read out loud her/his ideas for other to cross the overlapped ones and collected 8 statements for the next step.  Thanks to this method we underlined eight related subheadings as: Communication/Network, Diversity, Exploring, Anticipation, Spreading ideas, Idea combination and Outsiders consulting. 

 We continued our ideas development by doing the same thing with each of the statements had from the previous step. This tool works really well in terms of creating a lot of ideas and helping group members understand each other’s thoughts. It is a clear and systematic process to keep the flow of ideas to a very specific and practical result. But our time being limited, it was not possible for us to finish to explore every idea deeply, thus, there are also some weaknesses of the tool such as time costing. Furthermore, we also realized that this tool will certainly not suitable for a big group. Fortunately or unfortunately during the first part of the work day we were three so it was easier to work on it.

After a short presentation of our ideas and the tool we used, the next task consisted to use the last tool left. Thus, we used the Visioning tool (http://supervision58h.blogspot.fi/2015/03/this-week-we-decided-to-present-two-new.html).

At the beginning, most of us thought that the tool is good for a business situation rather than such case of a simple statement. So we were uncertain whether we should use it at all, since we thought it would be hard to create a vision of merely a concept. Rather than giving up, we decided to take it as a challenge and keep going. We had the idea of creating a vision of what the circumstances would look like in order to support the “Idea flows and creativity between people”. Everyone took some time to think about our own real experience on the best situations for new ideas creation, we combined all those separate notes together.

Based on that, our vision regarding idea flows and creativity between people has been built: Teams built on the foundation of trust, engage to the problem solving process by stopping to think, focus on the context, comparing alternatives and dare to share. This vision built on the core element, would give us direction for future creative work, which is the purpose of a vision, it would be our director thread.

This work day was really interesting. We learned more about the skills and weaknesses of everyone and therefore, we are more and more able to deal with. Consequently we think that we can say that we are becoming more and more efficient..