Make Ideation a Natural Part of Your Team’s Mindset & Work
Listening to your team is the most cost-effective and quickest way to tap into a wide range of ideas. Your team are the closest to the problems, and the opportunities. Learn how to make it natural for your team to capture and share compelling insights and ideas, as they work.
Start with Why
If you’re a fan of Simon Sinek like us, then you’ll understand the importance of ‘starting with why.’ If you can define your why, then you create a brilliant north star for your team to innovate towards.
Ask the right questions
If questions are too broad, like “How do you think we can make our workplace better?” the responses might not be practical or relevant to actual struggles. More so, if questions are too narrow, like “How would you rate your current workspace arrangement?” you risk limiting creative input.
Get Involved: Check in and Engage
Equally important to well-thought-out questions is the communication strategy that goes with it. You can drive employee engagement by engaging as the leader. #stratapp makes this easier, because the social collaboration takes place around the work, ideas and innovation challenges, removing the noise of endless chat channels. Engagement at all levels, without chaos, is the key to discovering breakthrough innovations.
Use the right tool for idea capture
Single-use apps for ideation and the crowdsourcing of new ideas tend to run out of steam after 3 to 6 months. What works best is where ideas capture, and the ability to run challenges to crowdsource new ideas, is part of the social collaboration framework you have running across all work taking place in your team.
So far #stratapp is the only app that has this framework (the “ideation engine”) built into tasks, workboards, meetings, risks, goals, objectives and key results. This allows your whole team to drive innovation across all aspects of work, without consciously thinking about it or having to go somewhere to do it – the experience becomes a natural part of the work they do.
Open minds win on ideation
Ray Dalio talks of an ideas meritocracy, where every person in your team feels free to suggest and discuss any type of idea at any time. As a team leader, you can easily create this culture with #stratapp.