Peer Review Assignment 1 – Week 3 on Creativity

Example answer

1) Think of a team that you are part of or you lead. For example, a team in your work or study
environment. Describe the team in a couple of paragraphs and make sure that you address
the following issues:
 What is the general goal of the team?
 What kind of people does the team consist of?
 What are the strengths and weaknesses of your team?

This section should provide the reader with background information about your team.
Do not use more than 150 words.
The team is formed to investigate the case, come up with solution and present the findings during
the lecture. The aim is to approach the problem of decreased employees work/life balance from
different perspectives and come up with solution. The process of team formation was
externalized and Professor of the course randomly assigned the people who have to be in the
same team. The team members have the same gender and business background. I believe the
strengths of my team is analytical thinking and in depth knowledge of the business processes. The
weaknesses are the lack of diversity in a team and time constraints of the team members.

(Note from video: for creative ideas it is a must to have : expertise, creative thinking skills and
motivation (intrinsic) )

2) Explain why and how you want your team to be creative. Do so by addressing the following
issues:
 What type of creative ideas do you need? Are you for example struggling with a
problem, a case or a challenge?
 What would be the criteria that you would judge the ideas of the team on?

You may want to watch video 1 and 2 for reasons why you need to be creative. Altogether,
this section should provide the reader with a good idea of the wanted output of the
brainstorm session. Do not use more than 150 words.

Where do you need creative ideas for? ?

The decreased work/life balanced has caused a high dissatisfaction rate of employees, they
complain that they are always tired and managers observed that their motivation level and quality
of their work decreased.
The company has already tried a lot of different ways to increase work/life balance, however they
were unsuccessful. Therefore, we have to approach the problem from different perspective and
provide a different solution which might help the managers to reduce the problem with decreased
work/life balance in the company.
I will judge the creative idea by evaluating if it is NOVEL(original, cool) and USEFUL. In this way we
will avoid having ideas which were already generated by the company and also we aim that they
would lead to a solution which could be implemented in the company.
 3) Design a brainstorm session that is specifically designed to help your team. Make sure you
try to overcome your team’s weak spots, to stimulate creativity and to eventually come up
with creative ideas. You could watch video’s 3, 4 and 5 of this week to get inspired, but do
not hesitate to use other sources as well. This section should provide the reader with a
detailed description of a brainstorm process that a reader with little background knowledge
would be able to implement. Do not use more than 200 words.

For the brainstorming session we use Nominal group technique. We meet with the team members
and discuss the topic and main problem. Then we take at least 5 minutes to generate ideas in
silence individually, we write them all down and wait until others finish with their thoughts. After
this we present the ideas and discuss them with everyone. We ensure that each member
contributes to the discussion and understands the idea. While discussing /evaluating the idea we
use left-right brain alteration technique. We think about financial benefits and effectiveness the
idea can bring and also we switch out thinking to other domain and start considering the
emotions of employees. Then we rank the ideas and decide which ones will be used. This
brainstorming technique leads to more and higher quality ideas.

(Other techniques which could be mentioned: 1) Scamper technique. When substitute, combine,
adapt, modify /magnify /minify, put in other use, eliminate, reverse /rearrange. 2) Design thinking
– always start with customer, observe them and based on this insight from observations; you
come up with ideas to solve their problem. Then you can use scamper and left right brain
alteration. )

4) Describe why the proposed brainstorm design is especially suited to help your team. Refer to
the team’s tasks, the weak spots and strong points of the team, the team’s environment etc.
to argue for the effectiveness of the brainstorm design. This section should persuade the
reader of the effectiveness of your brainstorm design for your team. Do not use more than
150 words.

The proposed brainstorming design is suited for the team due to several reasons. Firstly, taking
some time to think about ideas in silence helps us not to be distracted from each other ideas and
generate our own thinking to the problem. Secondly, left-right brain alteration overcomes
thinking bias. Since everyone has the same background and diversity in the team is missing, by
using this technique more perspectives to the same problem are introduced. Finally, in depth
knowledge of business helps us to avoid generating irrelevant ideas and by using this techniques
brainstorm session becomes more efficient. By following this framework we concentrate about
the issue of the company and we do not fluctuate from the topic. This helps our team to achieve
the most unique and at the same time useful ideas which will help the company to increase their
employees satisfaction with work.

(Other techniques which could be mentioned: Scamper helps to ask question you would not be
thinking about and adds some structure in idea generation. Design thinking brings structure to
idea generation, is easily used and is not necessarily costly.)