15 Approaches to help us come up with creative ideas

After you have identified goals and defined outcomes, you will want to design some communication activities (see ‘Designing communication activities’).

By definition, there is no reliable recipe for creativity, but the principles outlined in this guide will help you craft messages that have the most chance of success. In addition to these, there are certain approaches that can help to produce creative results.

Typically these approaches involve ideation. This is usually done in a group setting to generate more ideas, and is useful to do among individuals who resemble the audiences you’re hoping to speak to. In the first phase, divergent thinking (commonly known as brainstorming), the goal is to come up with as many ideas as you can very quickly, without worrying if they are good or bad. In the second, convergent phase, you select the most promising ideas and develop them further. Sometimes the idea that seemed the silliest may actually produce the best result.

The discipline of design also offers many exercises that can help with ideation.

For example, in Crazy 8s, each participant folds a piece of paper into eight sections and then has eight minutes to sketch eight distinct ideas, with one minute per idea.

The Worst Idea Exercise encourages participants to come up with the most terrible ideas they can think of for delivering a message or solving a problem. By deliberately thinking of bad ideas, the pressure to generate the ‘perfect’ idea is removed, often leading to surprising and innovative solutions. Once the worst ideas are listed, the group then analyses them to find hidden gems.

You can also use random prompts, for example, using a random word generator, or opening a book to a random page, to get inspiration. Can you come up with a message which relates to the random word or concept, and still aligns with your intended outcome?