Building a Reputation for Collaboration From "Maddock Douglas Innovation Engine: The Innovation Engine Community

For those of us who do our best creative thinking alone, its always good to remember that idea generation can be done well as a team sport, too.

Here are a couple of collaboration tips to help you get started. Aversion to collaboration can be spurred by a number of reasons. You may think better alone. You may not have anyone to collaborate with. Or you may be wary of the “lurking but.” You know, hearing something like “that’s a cool idea, but…” Most folks tend to shy away from collaborating for fear of someone judging their ideas. Who wants to have a perfectly good idea squelched by some overbearing know-it-all?

One way to deal with the “lurking but” is to change your language when speaking with collaborators.

During our ideations we teach people to respond to new ideas by replying “yes and” rather than “yeah, but.” It helps encourage building on each other’s ideas versus beating them down. Plus it’s nearly impossible to kill even the wildest idea by saying “yes and.” As an example: Frank says, “What if we put wings on pigs so they could fly?” Sophia says, “Yes and then we invest in air traffic controlling equipment.” Maxine replies, “Yes and then we invent pig diapers and make millions!”... You get the idea.

Try using “yes and” around home and the workplace. You’ll be surprised how much easier it is to collaborate.

Another fun way to collaborate is by playing email telephone. A couple years ago my youngest son was having difficulty coming up with and elaborating on fresh new ideas for his creative writing assignments. Wanting to help, but not wanting to offer too heavy a hand, I came up with a fun way for us to collaborate that helped break his block.

One of us would send an email to the other comprised of one to three sentences of a storyline. The recipient would have to respond in kind within a predetermined time (most cases we made it that same day). The subject could be anything. I remember one funny exchange began “The wind blew like stinging ice across the frozen Antarctic. Three penguins stood huddled together sharing a smoke.” (I recommend you throw a zinger in there to help interrupt the recipient’s logical mind and stir their imagination.) My son was so thrown by the oddity of the premise of smoking penguins that he responded back immediately. “At their feet were dozens of frozen smoke rings.”

We played this email telephone game for a few weeks, creating dozens of creative scenarios and storylines. We would switch off where he might start a story or two and then I would. Sometimes we’d surprise the other guy and build on the middle of an older storyline just to shake things up. In the end, collaborating like that helped him realize a couple things: 1) He really does have a ton of ideas swimming up in his head, and 2) It’s okay to get inspiration from others. Best of all, he had really exercised his creative brain for a few weeks with this exercise and was left with a ton of creative storylines.

(By the way, a nice little extra for me is that I kept all those wacky writings, and now, years later, I get to refer back to them whenever I feel wistful and reminiscent.)

The point of these exercises is not necessarily to come up with game-changing ideas. It’s to help us come out of our shells and learn to collaborate with others for inspiration, fresh thinking and maybe a little fun, too. But who knows, it may actually help you spawn the next big thing.

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