Making innovation child’s play
23/04/2010, Author: Ruth Williams
During my work I am often asked to help groups of people tap into their creative and innovative playful side whilst still keeping one eye on the aims of the project. There is always a balance to be struck here to make sure we don’t choose something so ‘way out’ and wacky that eyes are rolled and people feel uncomfortable about taking part. Today I am going to share some of the hints and tips around facilitating these events that I have developed over the years and a few suggestions for fun activities.
Facilitating events:
1. Check the room you are going to use for the activity in advance – think about how people will move around the space and make sure it will help them feel free and not confined – natural light, some fresh air and plain neutral walls are some features that can help – see last week’s tip from Nancy Kline’s work – does the environment say to people that they matter
2. Be clear, succinct and direct about the rules of the game – this is the time to tell and add structure – if people are clear about the rules they often feel safer to experiment
3. Commit to play without worrying about ‘what people think’ – this is what children do; if they are playing at being a zombie they won’t break out and talk to you about something else – if you role model this the group will follow
4. Never mock, make fun of or put people down and send the message that this is not how we are going to work together. If the flow of your activities allows you could set this as one of the ground rules at the start – something along the lines of – ‘all suggestions are welcome, especially the wacky and different’
5. Smile, relax and check your body language and tone of voice communicates a sense of ease. The more you enjoy the activity the more the group will follow your mood.
Ideas for activities and tools that can feed into your innovation work:
1. Create creativity boxes of materials to use when facilitating. These could include coloured pens, lots of different coloured and shaped post-it notes, scissors, white tac, unusual stencils or rulers, scented pens, coloured paper.
2. Have prepared a photo of people of a scene that feeds into the theme for activities during the day. Start off by asking everyone to form tableaux of the scene then ask each character to vocalise what the character they are playing is thinking and feeling. You can move into investigating what happens if you bring the tableaux to life and/or what happened just before the tableaux occurred. Do it through physical action rather than discussion. Make links to themes for the day.
3. A game of tag that moves on for the second round to a game of zombie tag (when you’re tagged you fall down dead then arise as a zombie – zombie’s can also tag each other but must move as zombies). Use this to illustrate the importance of committing to action – see point 3 above.
4. Have prepared a range of objects. Each group has an object and their brainstorming for your activity needs to link to their object. This produces great results and injects a good dose of fun.
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