CNBC.COMYou've probably had some of your best ideas in the shower.
Why not at work?
"We're paid to have our best ideas at work, but we never do, do we?" says Duncan Wardle, former head of innovation and creativity at The Walt Disney Company. Wardle has since founded his own creative consulting company, ID8, and spoke with CNBC Make It from WOBI's World Business Forum in New York City on Nov. 6.
Between tasks like emails, presentations and meetings, many workers' responsibilities don't necessarily encourage creativity or innovation, not to mention many just "don't have time to think" at work, Wardle says.
Wardle thinks he has a solution. He uses what he calls "energizers" to get people's creative juices flowing at work. An energizer, by his definition, is simply "a 60-second exercise specifically designed to make you laugh."
"The moment I hear laughter, I just opened the door between your conscious and subconscious brain and placed you back in the shower where it is when you have your best ideas," Wardle says.
He thinks of it as a mental reset to jolt you out of your routine at work, when your brain might be on autopilot to an extent. The point is to help you loosen up a bit and tap into the creative part of your brain.
"What you're doing is reminding people of a time when they knew they were creative," Wardle says. "When you ask people who are the most creative people you ever met, people say kids. What do kids do that we don't? They play."
The energizer could be as simple as playing rock, paper, scissors, but the more absurd, the better.
One example Wardle gives is pretending you're "the world's leading designer of parachutes for elephants" and having your colleagues mock-interview you about that job. When you take turns, the next person's ridiculous job might be selling invisible wallpaper.
For a different kind of energizer, you might draw from a common improv exercise, "Once upon a time." This involves one person beginning to make up a story by offering up a sentence, before a second person builds off of that sentence with their own, and so on.
You can spend a minute or two at the top of a meeting or brainstorm running an energizer before applying this new creativity to the topic or task at hand, Wardle says.
"I don't expect people to be playful every minute of every day," Wardle says. "I do expect people to be playful when they're trying to develop new ideas."
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