How I Increased the Motivation of Participants in my Creativity Workshops

Edward Glassman , United States

My approach eventually led to my developing my 3-4 day Creativity & Innovation Meetings, which I describe in Chapter One of my recent book, "Team Creativity At Work I & II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best."

I am Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; Founder and Head, Program For Team Effectiveness and Creativity; Guggenheim Fellow, Stanford University; Visiting Fellow, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, NC; Wrote many books, articles, newspaper columns about creativity and team building at work; and have led many workshops and Creativity & Innovations Meetings for many large corporations.

Here is how I dramatically increased the motivation of the participants in my creativity workshop to learn advanced creative problem solving techniques and to share them with their co-workers back at work.

When I first started out doing Creative Thinking workshops, I was confronted by a problem that had me stumped. I thought that the learning and back-on-the-job sharing could be greatly increased, but I was blocked in my thinking how I could do this.

I was in a rut, trapped in an unyielding mind funnel. I just couldn’t get out of that box.

I wanted to motivate the participants so they would thirst to learn advanced creativity techniques and apply them back on-the-job with their co-workers.

After some unsatisfying thinking time, I spent about a week incubating and focusing mentally on the problem of how to motivate participants. I non-evaluatively listed all ideas, rejecting none. Yet none seemed adequate. Suddenly, I came upon this now-simple and now-obvious solution...

I would focus the entire workshop on solving an important problem of the company, and bring together people from throughout the company who wanted to solve it. I easily obtained the cooperation of managers and executives for this approach. And it paid off.

The result was highly motivated participants who were eager to learn the advanced creativity techniques in order to solve the company's important problem in a creative way. And they were greatly motivated to bring the techniques back to the workplace to solve other problems. Nothing motivates like focusing people on problems it is in their self-interest to solve.

This approach eventually led to my developing my 3-4 day Creativity & Innovation Meetings, which I describe in Chapter One of my recent book, "Team Creativity At Work I & II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best."

Contact me through my website: http://www.creativitybook.net

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