The Mad Hatters

Posted by: Heidi Seymour | 20 December 2007

We often look to children and marvel at how creative they are. Ideas flow and there seems no limit to a child's imagination. There is no mystery here; children simply have not yet learned how things should be.

Instant judgement is the enemy of creativity...

Edward De Bono

We as adults judge ourselves and our ideas far too harshly. So before an idea has even begun to grow the majority of us have already slammed the metaphorical door shut on that thought or idea.

On Tues of last week we held a creativity workshop. The key aim was to get everyone to begin to make creative thinking part of everyday thinking.  We would stimulate the right of brain, get everyone to access his or her inner child and see what we could create in a safe non-judgemental arena. Oooo and have lots of fun in the process.

We've also embraced the "6 thinking hats system" for creative thinking at Mando as devised by Edward DeBono. The thinker can put one on or take one these metaphorical hats off to indicate the type of thinking that is being used. Read more about the process here...  http://www.debonogroup.com/ I can thoroughly recommend it for quick, productive meetings!

Anyway back to the workshop. We would use the 6 thinking hats system as our inspiration. The brief was simple. Brainstorm, design and create a hat that embodies all the characteristics, feelings, nature that the hat represents.

Three teams of two got together and were each randomly given one of the following statements to generate ideas from.

Red Hat:

This covers intuition, feelings and emotions. The red hat allows the thinker to put forward an intuition without any need to justify it.

Yellow Hat:

This hat finds reasons why something will work and why it will offer benefits. It can be used in looking forward to the results of some proposed action. It can also be used to find something of value in what has already happened.

Green Hat:

This is the hat of creativity, alternatives, proposals, what is interesting, provocations, and changes.

They were instructed to break the rules! There is no such thing as a bad idea. Just perhaps more appropriate ones.

I wasn't disappointed in the results... In the short hour that they had this is what they did!

Posted in: Creative