What Workshop Activities Help Spark New Ideas?
Structured workshops work far better than simply telling employees to "be creative". Popular formats include Design Thinking, Brainwriting, Hackathons, Reverse Brainstorming, and SCAMPER, and the right format depends on your goal, team size, current psychological safety, and available time. Unlike generic DIY sessions, purpose-built workshops adapt to your organisation's context and measure results.
Once an organisation has built a safe atmosphere for employees to feel confident proposing ideas, the next step is having a “tool” to draw those ideas out systematically. This is where the workshop, as a creativity tool, plays an important role.
This article looks at why workshops work, popular activity formats, and how to choose the right topic for the problem your organisation is facing.
Why Workshops Work Better Than Simply “Telling” People to Come Up with Ideas
Telling employees to “come up with a new idea” rarely works well, because our brains tend to stay locked into familiar patterns during regular day-to-day work. A well-designed workshop helps by:
- Creating an environment different from everyday work, freeing the mind from usual patterns
- Using a structured process, rather than leaving people to think freely without direction, which often lacks focus
- Encouraging participation from everyone, not just the people who are usually confident speaking up in meetings
- Letting ideas build on each other collaboratively, rather than being the output of just one person
Popular Workshop Formats
There are many workshop formats organisations around the world use to spark creativity. Each suits a different purpose:
- Design Thinking Workshop: focuses on understanding a problem from the real user's perspective before brainstorming solutions. Suits teams working on product or service development, or complex problem-solving
- Structured Brainstorming Session, such as the Brainwriting technique, where everyone writes down their own ideas before sharing. This helps reduce the problem of confident speakers dominating the conversation
- Hackathon: bringing cross-department teams together to solve a specific challenge within a limited time. Good for generating urgent ideas and building cross-team collaboration
- Reverse Brainstorming: flips the question from “how do we solve this problem” to “how could we make this problem worse”, which helps reveal the root cause of a problem more clearly before finding a solution
- SCAMPER: a technique that asks seven types of questions (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other use, Eliminate, Reverse) to build on an existing idea or product
How to Choose the Right Workshop for Your Team or Problem
No single workshop format is best for every situation. Choosing the right one should be based on:
- Your goal: do you need new product ideas, process improvements, or a solution to an immediate problem?
- Team size and composition: a small, familiar team might suit intensive brainstorming, while a cross-department team that doesn't know each other well may need a more structured process, such as Design Thinking
- The team's current level of psychological safety: teams that aren't yet confident speaking up should start with activities that reduce the pressure of speaking, such as Brainwriting, before moving to activities that require speaking in front of others
- Available time and resources: some workshops take just a few hours, while others, like a hackathon, may need a full day or several days
Assessing your team's situation before choosing a workshop matters just as much as the activity itself, because even a good workshop used at the wrong time can fail to deliver the results you're hoping for.
How Purpose-Built Workshops Differ from DIY Ones
Many organisations start by attempting to run their own workshop using methods found online. This can help to a degree, but it often lacks two important things:
- Adapting the process to fit the organisation's specific context, rather than applying a fixed formula
- Systematically measuring results afterwards, to see how many of the ideas generated were actually put into practice
Workshops designed by specialists typically include an assessment process before the activity begins, to tailor the session to what the organisation genuinely needs to develop, along with follow-up tracking afterwards to ensure the ideas generated don't stay confined to the meeting room.
In Summary
An effective workshop isn't just a fun activity to break up the routine. It's a tool designed to systematically draw out a team's creative potential. Choosing the right format for your goal, team and situation helps ensure the workshop delivers results you can actually use, not just a pleasant memory of the day.
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