Creativity tools
Creativity is a vital part of everyday life. Thinking more creatively can help us to be more effective in achieving harmony, balance and personal success in our lives. Being creative can also help us to become self-aware and enable us to respond to change in a flexible and effective way. Creativity is something we all have and we can all learn to be more creative.
Why is it used in service improvement?
Creativity can be usefully applied as part of a service improvement process alongside the more traditional tools and techniques outlined in the directory.
In today's world we live within an accelerated change environment and we have to develop skills that enable us to survive and thrive and find ways of living with the uncertainty that this brings. Developing creativity can help us when there are no pages in the manual to tell us how to deal with a particular situation.
As organisations become more and more complex their activity becomes more non-linear and unpredictable. Using creative tools can help us to focus on the way we relate and interact. This can improve the way teams work together as well as helping to transform services.
When to use it?
A creative process can be used within a variety of different contexts:
- Developing a team
- Creating a more level playing field when working in partnership particularly with
people that use services and the people that care for them - Challenging difficult cultures
- Problem solving
- Disseminating research
- Developing critical consciousness.
How to use it?
Creativity is best explored in a workshop setting and requires experienced facilitation. The most important part of the creative process in relation to service improvement takes place in the conversation that will be stimulated by the creative activity.
There is a wide range of activity that comes under the umbrella of creativity, which can be used. Click on the links below to find out information on each activity.
Please also contact Marian Naidoo, National Service Improvement Lead, Care Services Improvement Partnership, on marian.naidoo@csip.org.uk for advice and support on how to develop creativity in your organisation.
Creative exercises
Creative exercises have a range of purposes and are particularly useful when you want to be more effective in breaking down barriers, building relationships and trust. They can also be a useful way of developing the skills we need to be able to deal with uncertainty and change.
Theatre for development (also known in some places as popular theatre, community theatre and peoples' theatre) is a development tool that has been in existence for some twenty years. Theatre for development simply put, is theatre aimed at educating its audience on using creative ways to solve pertinent issues in order to encourage transformation. Theatre for development includes such activity as forum theatre, theatre of the oppressed and image theatre. In organisations it has potential as a means of enhancing learning and empowerment opportunities in a wide range of situations.
There are many ideas and techniques in theatre for development, one of the most popular coming from the Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal and his image and forum methods. Forum theatre creates a special kind of performance, where the distinction between reality and theatre is lifted by inviting the audience with their ideas on stage. Forum theatre works from rehearsal improvisation to create a scene of a specific issue or concern. Using the Greek terms "protagonist" and "antagonist," forum theatre seeks to show a person (the protagonist) who is trying to deal with an issue or concern and failing because of the resistance of one or more obstacles (the antagonists).
Image theatre uses the human body as a tool for representing feelings, ideas, and relationships. Through sculpting others or using our own body to demonstrate a body position, participants create anything from one-person to large-group image sculptures that reflect the sculptor's impression of a situation or issue of concern. Image theatre is a silent theatre, a great stage to begin leadership development.
Improvisation requires participants to be themselves in a situation and to draw on their own emotions and experiences in order to relate in a believable way to each other. Improvisation gives participants a sense of experiencing certainty and uncertainty at the same time as they make sense of both their own and others actions, which is useful, when undergoing service improvement.