Idea Blocks Exercise
Idea blocks are a surprising and engaging activity to experience the value of everyone’s ideas through the use of feedback. This exercise is great for practicing creativity, lateral thinking, feedback, collaboration, and other teamwork skills.
As you work as a team, brainstorming sessions often sway towards the vocal and dominant personalities even though other team members have valuable ideas, too. By forcing these ideas to have equal footing, each team member’s ability to contribute is established.
Create a fictional problem that must be solved. It could be a theoretical product, a brain teaser, a riddle, a design challenge — anything that needs a solution. Assemble your team, and have them write down an idea on a large sheet of paper.
They only need to write a sentence or two.
Have them pass the paper to the person on their left, and instruct them to use the new idea to build another solution upon. Continue for several rounds, and then see what the results are.
Allow final space for participants to share the initial idea for their sheet and the continuous improvements that were made throughout each round.
You may want to choose a fictional problem that allows you to reveal one aspect of the challenge each round.
Moment of Reflection
- What surprised you about this exercise and why?
- What was the idea that you liked the most? How was it built?
- Do you think it is important and valuable to know the contributions of all the members of the group?
- Why do you think that many more solutions can be thought of when everyone can express their ideas? What benefit is achieved by sharing ideas with others?
- Can imagination and group creativity be used to address other problems or situations in everyday life?
The topics of this publication: interactions, teamwork, collaboration, creativity, imagination, brainstorming, cooperation, reflection, trust, feedback, integration, foster relationships
