We Explored the Best Strategies to Foster Creative Collaboration
Creative people often have strong individual ideas and visions. This is great for producing unique and innovative work, but it can also lead to conflicts creatives need to collaborate. In this guide, we unpack a few different strategies for fostering healthy, productive creative collaboration.
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Helpful Summary
Overview: We explore a few different tips, strategies, and techniques for promoting effective collaboration among creative individuals.
Why trust us: We are a leading client gallery tool that helps creatives collaborate more effectively with clients, stakeholders, and team members.
Why this matters: Creative collaboration merges individual expertise, spurring synergy and accountability, enhancing camaraderie, and resulting in superior collective outcomes.
Action points: Adopt design thinking, limit face-to-face meetings, utilize visual feedback tools, implement file-sharing conventions, and break down silos.
Further research: Check out the Picflow blog for more insights into creative workflows.
Looking to Master Creative Collaboration?
Do you know the feeling when you're in a group brainstorming session that's just not clicking? People are throwing out ideas but there needs to be more flow and momentum, and you leave without making much progress.
It's frustrating. And unfortunately, it’s a common problem when creative people try to collaborate in ways that aren’t actually conducive to creative collaboration.
In this Picflow article, we'll walk through a list of tips and strategies to foster productive, creative collaboration in your team. With some simple techniques and ground rules, you can bring out the best in your group and take your projects to the next level.
But first…
Why Listen to Us?
Trusted by over 10,000 creatives, agencies, and well-known brands like Universal Music Group, BBDO, and Tag Heuer, Picflow is a leading online gallery tool that helps creatives collaborate and share their work seamlessly.
We understand the challenges that creative teams face when working together. So, we've gathered our own experiences and insights, along with input from experts, to provide you with valuable tips on how to navigate the collaborative process successfully.
What is Creative Collaboration?
Creative collaboration is the proces of bringing together individuals with unique skills and perspectives to work towards a common (and challenging) goal—creating something new.
That “something” could be:
A new product or service
A marketing campaign
An event or experience
A piece of art or design
Whatever it is, creative collaboration involves pooling together ideas, resources, and talents to produce a final result that wouldn't have been possible without the diverse contributions of each team member.
And spoiler alert, it’s often challenging process.
Roadblocks to Creative Collaboration
Before we talk solutions, we should spend a bit of time understanding the problem. What exactly makes creative collaboration so challenging?
Here are a few common roadblocks:
Egos: Not all creative people are egotistical. But it’s not controversial to argue that creativity takes a certain degree of self-belief. And when you have multiple individuals with strong opinions and a desire to be heard, egos can easily clash.
Lack of Communication: This one might seem obvious, but it’s worth mentioning. When team members don’t communicate effectively or clearly, misunderstandings can occur and ideas can get lost in translation.
Time Constraints: Creative collaboration takes time—time to brainstorm, experiment, and refine ideas. But in today's fast-paced world, deadlines are often tight and there is pressure to produce results quickly.
Fear of Rejection: It’s not easy putting your ideas out there for others to critique and potentially reject. This fear can lead to hesitancy in sharing ideas or holding back on giving honest feedback.
How to Facilitate Creative Collaboration
1. Establish Ground Rules
When we talk about ground rules, we’re not talking about strict, creativity-stifling guidelines. We’re talking about baseline rules your team will follow when engaging with others, listening to ideas, offering feedback, etc.
The ground rule you set can be as simple or as complex as you like. To get you thinking, here are a few suggestions:
Lead with empathy
Get used to discomfort (within reason)
Seek out diverse perspectives
Don’t judge
Don’t share information that isn’t yours to share
Move up to speak or move back to let someone else speak
In our experience, that last suggestion is one of the more important rules to drive home. Every team member has tendencies toward either speaking up or staying quiet, and it’s important that both groups practice self-awareness and actively work to balance out their contributions.
2. Use Design Thinking
Design thinking is an iterative approach to problem-solving. You start vague, and slowly but surely refine your thinking through systematic discussions, prototyping, research, testing, and so on.
Here’s a rundown of the stages:
Empathize: Understand the user and their needs.
Define: Refine your understanding of the problem.
Ideate: Generate ideas for solutions.
Prototype: Build a working model of your solution.
Test: Get feedback on your prototype and make improvements.
Implement: Put your solution into action.
Once you implement, you go straight back to the empathize stage.
This process is a powerful tool for creative collaboration because it gives your team’s efforts a structure. At each stage, there’s a clear goal—and you can’t make progress until you’ve a) achieved it and b) found alignment.
3. Hold Fewer Face-to-Face Meetings
This one is a bit counterintuitive, but the number of meetings you hold may be hindering your team’s creative potential. According to alost every study of meeting practices, the vast majority of meetings are not productive—and employees are tired of them.
Whenever possible, look for alternatives like:
Async check-ins to guage progress
Async video tools like Loom
Async review, feedback and approval tools like Picflow (more on what we do in a minute!)
The result is usually a more energized, less cynical team.
4. Use Visual Feedback Tools
Around 60-65% of the general population are visual thinkers. This number also tends to increase dramatically in settings that require a lot of problem solving. As a result, written feedback or verbal instructions may not always be the most effective way to communicate with your team.
Instead, consider using visual feedback tools like screenshots or annotated images to clearly convey your ideas and suggestions. This not only helps ensure everyone is on the same page, but also allows for a more efficient and creative collaboration process.
Take Picflow, for example.
We offer creatives, marketers, and project managers the ability to easily collaborate on visual content and videos. You can easily create galleries to store assets, share access with clients and stakeholders, and gather feedback in the form of:
Comments
Tags and labels
Approval lists
By visually annotating specific areas or elements, team members can effectively communicate their ideas, preferences, and suggestions, facilitating a deeper understanding and alignment among collaborators.
5. Outsource or Automate Non-Creative Tasks
Everyone one your team has a finite amount of time and energy. And at the moment, there’s a good chance you’re wasting resources on non-creative tasks. These could include things like organizing files, tracking approvals, and formatting documents.
By outsourcing or automating these tasks, your team can focus on the more important and creative aspects of their work.
Here are some different ways to outsource or automate non-creative tasks:
Use project management software to track approvals and deadlines.
Hire virtual assistants to help with administrative tasks like organizing files and scheduling meetings.
Use tools like Zapier to automate repetitive tasks, such as sending out emails or creating documents.
By freeing up your team's time, you give them more space to generate new ideas and approaches. This can lead to improved productivity and more innovative solutions. Additionally, by delegating these tasks, you can also promote a sense of trust and accountability within your team.
6. Break Down Silos
When different departments or individuals work in isolation, valuable insights and perspectives can be lost. Promoting cross-functional collaboration and communication allows businesses to leverage diverse expertise and viewpoints to generate innovative ideas and solutions.
Here’s how it can help:
Encourages diverse perspectives: Breaking down silos allows individuals from different departments or teams to share their unique insights and expertise, fostering a more diverse range of perspectives.
Promotes knowledge sharing: When information flows freely across organizational boundaries, team members can learn from each other's experiences and expertise, leading to greater innovation and problem-solving.
Facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration: Siloed teams often duplicate efforts or miss opportunities for collaboration. Breaking down silos encourages cross-functional teamwork, enabling individuals with different skill sets to work together towards common goals.
Enhances creativity and innovation: By creating an environment where ideas can be freely exchanged and built upon, breaking down silos stimulates creativity and innovation, resulting in more robust and effective solutions to complex challenges.
Conclusion
With the right balance of facilitation and freedom, your people can think outside the box while still delivering on core objectives. When you foster this creative collaboration, it unlocks the full potential of your team.
At Picflow, we help creatives collaborate more effectively with tools for project delivery, review and approval, and more.
Sign up for Picflow for free.
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