The most successful project is one that rolls by itself.

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, is creativity.”
-Charlie Mingus

When I started my creative workshops at work, trying to get some creativity into a highly administrative work environment, I had no idea where this would lead.

I did it for myself, because I was lacking creativity and I also wanted to share one of my passions which is painting.

The workshops were a success and turned into a ‘Creative Thinking’ pilot workshop organised with Human Resources.

What usually happens after you have been to a training?
You’re all spiced up, enthusiastic and full of goodwill to apply all that you have learned. Then after a few days or weeks, the effects ebb and you’re back to your old routine.

I absolutely did not want this to happen with the creativity training.

So I organised an ad hoc ‘creative spark’ session with the same people that attended the training. I asked them to come up with real business problems and we used the techniques that we had introduced in the training to find ideas and solutions to those problems.

The session was short (1 hour) and after a quick refresher we tackled one business problem. People came out of this sessions refreshed, full of energy and found that it not only gave them a good, creative break during the day, but also helped them to maintain and practice the knowledge level they had gained at the training.

Today we had another creative spark session. There were less people but another problem was successfully brainstormed.

The goal of the sessions has been achieved, namely to make a group of people autonomous in coming together and teach each other and learn from each other.

The project of spreading creativity has left the amorphous stage and rolled into a life of its own.

I love it when that happens.