3 Exercises to Boost Your Team's Creativity

Almost every business, of every size, across sectors, employs creativity training, from whiteboard brainstorming sessions to design thinking. It's a billion-dollar industry, and with good reason: Creativity is the main engine of innovation and entrepreneurship, and a major driver of resilience. Instead, it perpetuates expert bias and pseudo-innovation, and although it can temporarily boost morale, it does little over the long haul to reduce burnout. On the whole, research has shown it to be at best inadequate and at worst counterproductive. To understand what's broken, and how to fix it, my lab partnered with teams at a variety of organizations, among them Silicon Valley startups, U.S. Special Operations, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Fortune 50 companies.