How can you create a creative working atmosphere to generate as many different ideas as possible? Reduce hierarchies during the brainstorming process, as Eveline Geiser explains in the NZZ article. To put it more casually: send the boss on a coffee break. Any form of evaluation is detrimental to creativity. Don’t let the team express their ideas, but write them down.
Organisational psychologists speak of ‘brain writing’. In concrete terms, this means that each team member puts their ideas on paper. Then everyone passes their piece of paper to the next colleague, who adds further ideas. According to recent experiments, a team finds the most ideas when it alternates between individual brainstorming and brainwriting.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
‘Brain writing’ against the herd mentality
Writing things down in advance is not only an important tool for finding creative ideas. Writing down your own thoughts can help to ensure that important individual insights are not concealed due to the herd mentality, especially in crisis management during a camp report. As a staff manager, you should therefore ask your staff members to write down their own assessment of an important measure under discussion in brief, even if only for five minutes. Only then should you open the discussion.
