Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

A few years ago, we developed Inotivities: activities that lead to insight and innovation.

Our experience in leading hundreds of creative facilitations taught us that it was usually the short term, interactive, and collaborative games that led to the best ideas.

The Dashboard Inotivity. This was inspired by our work with management information systems, Toyota, financial advisor workstations, and more recently, Scott Klososky’s Velocity Manifesto.

The Inotivity in Brief:

Participants create a visual dashboard (Think car or airplane) that would give them all the information they need to make smarter, faster decisions.

How to Play:

While the Dashboard Inotivity can be played by individuals, it’s more usually effective in pairs.  The first step is to identify needs/wants. The second step is to prioritize those needs in order from must have to want to have.  The third step is to visualize (draw) the dashboard. 

The goal is to create a dashboard for each partner in the team.  This dashboard is the beginning of a series of refinements that will lead to developing the ideal flow of data and an action plan for implementing it.

Klososky provides a great metaphor. “Think of it (dashboard) as periscopes allowing a manager or executive to have a quick view into the analytics that are truly important to the business.”

The benefits of this Inotivity is that it allows an individual to explore beyond what’s possible. For example, in one session, a CEO created a motivation dial.  He could see at a glance -- the level of motivation in the organization by department and individual. 

Another manager wanted to have a meeting value dial.  When employees met, her instrument panel showed the cumulative cost in real time of what that meeting cost and was compared with the actual results or output from the meeting. 

This exercise helps managers or individuals understand what kinds of information they are currently getting and what information has the greatest impact on decisions they make. Sometimes participants discover a need for information that they never anticipated.

The value of a teammate is to act as a question asker and clarifier. Why do you need that information? How often do you use it?  Does someone else already have the information?

Ultimately, the goal is to turn some of the more powerful ideas into reality. Some systems may already exist and some you may be able to customize with your IT or MIS team. 

Check out the Velocity Manifesto below: The Velocity Manifesto: Harnessing Technology, Vision, and Culture to Future-Proof your Organization