Challenges - Part 2

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

Challenges - 2

I started from previous post to talk about challenges faced while establishing the creativity room. I mentioned the first challenge which was the location of the room. In this post, I will talk about the second challenge which is actually the biggest challenge we faced: the budget.

The challenge was that there was no budget since this room was an initiative from the department and there was no planned budget for it. The amazing thing that the team didn’t give up and paid from their own pocket to establish the room.

I remember I mentioned this information to one of the European consultant and he was shocked to hear that!!! Simply, all the team members paid from themselves and without any pressure from anyone. That is the greatness of this team which I’m extremely proud to work with.

It is true that the room at phase one didn’t look very beautiful compared to now after implementing the second phase, however, many visitors were amazed while visiting the room. I think that this is because of the idea behind the room. Having a room called ‘Creativity Room’ was something new, so it was amazing.

However, there were some people who didn’t like the idea or the design and this is something normal. It is quite impossible to satisfy all people although I was telling some of them that this design is because of the limitation of the budget and you should instead thank us to establish this room.

The budget was really a challenge, but we were able to overcome it with support of Allah then with this great team. I should not forget also the management support which was really a positive energy for us.

I’m sure that many teams will give up and complain that budget is not available, so there is no need to establish such rooms, However, when you are working with a great team with full management support, the decision will surely change: “Let us all work together to establish this room”.

I will talk in the next post about another challenge which is also important to know. Until that time, see you Insha’Allah J

Challenges - Part 1

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

Challenges -1

As I indicated from my first posts in this blog that I will share my experience from this room in all stages in order to benefit anyone who wants to establish a similar room in his/her place. One of the main topics to share experience on is challenges while establishing creativity room.

Challenges are something normal while implementing any new idea or project. We, as creativity room team faced many challenges before and during implementation of creativity room.

To be honest, I suggested in our division suggestion system to apply the idea of creativity room, but it was rejected with the comment: not feasible – as I remember -.

The matter didn’t stop here. Our department head had the same idea in her mind since we attended together a conference about creativity and the concept of creativity room was mentioned there. The department head took the opinion of her subordinates and she was very happy to know that I suggested the same in the suggestion system – before it was rejected -, so she assigned me as a team leader to manage and apply this idea with a team of five members from different department.

We faced different challenges before starting this project, but the main two were: no budget was available for this project and no location was specified for us. We started to think how to overcome these challenges. The main important thing that we all focused on that this room should be established despite of the challenges we were facing.

We started with the second challenge which was the location of the room. We started to look for different options and study the advantages and disadvantages of them. We proposed three locations for approval and we got approval on the largest room – thanks Allah for that -.

Suitable location is an important factor for success and very significant for such rooms since it will provide space for more activities. Our selected room was large enough to have many activities. Really we took an opportunity to get this location since it was planned to be future offices for employees, but our department head supported us to take it to establish creativity room.

One important lesson that I personally learnt that management support is one of the key elements for success of any project, and that is what we got from our management.

I will continue with more challenges in the next post. Until that time, see you Insha’Allah :)

Lessons Learnt

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(Lessons Learnt)

In this post, I want to share one of the main programs we perform after each activity which is very interesting and beneficial that is: writing lessons learnt from the activity.

After each activity in the creativity room, we request the participants to write on the smart board what they learnt from the activity. We request each one to write one benefit with his / her name beside the benefit.

This small activity has many benefits. It ensures that each participant has learnt something which is important for us as organizers.  Our main target is learning from these activities along with having fun.

Another benefit is sharing knowledge between all. When each one will write something, he/she is automatically sharing an information which could not be known by others or they did not pay attention to this point while performing the activity. After the session ends, We send these benefits to all participants by email.

Listing the benefits will show the difference in thinking among participants. We can see variety of lessons learnt although all participants performed the same activity.

To sum up, we observed many creative outcomes while listing lessons learned by different participants.  We believe that expressing thoughts and understandings in writing is a skill by itself that is being enhanced through the organized activities. Also, writing on a smart board itself is quite fun and interesting.

Although this activity is taking very short time, it has many benefits that  would encourage us to continue with it each time.

See you in next post Insha’Allah :)

Examples of Positive Energy Activities

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(Examples of Positive Energy Activities)

In the last post, I started about the third objective of the creativity room which is Positive Energy. I want to mention one of the main activities we are conducting to serve  the objective which is called (The Stage).

The stage – as you can see in the above picture – is designed as winners’ stage and the objective of this activity is to share the success story of a winner in order to spread positive energy  among  all other present employees. The participant will stand on the stage to feel as a winner then tell his success story to others. We believe that whoever stands on the stage will get positive energy more than others since  elevated position  has its own  feeling.

I personally noticed that after each physical game, the participants are getting nice positive energy since there will be challenges and targets to be achieved. When we are playing carpet and colored balls, the feeling of positive energy is spread  among all. Of course, there  will be more positive energy if the particular team wins.

Another game is the hilum stick activity which is a very challenging game. It is a very nice activity to gain positive energy since there is a common target to be achieved by all participants as a team and all will be excited and motivated to achieve it.

In fact, it is not easy to have many activities for positive energy. I remember that in phase 1 of creativity room we had some walls to place positive sentences. It is really a challenge to have more activities to serve this objective and we will try for more activities in next phases Insha’Allah.  Also, if you have any ideas for positive energy activities, please share it on the blog and we will be happy to implement it, if possible.

Positive energy is a very important objective and we need to concentrate on it always since it is  crucial factor for enhancing employees’ achievements and productivity.

See you in next post Insha’Allah :)   

Creativity Room Objectives - Part 3

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(Creativity Room Objectives - Part 3)

In the previous posts, I mentioned two objectives of the creativity room which are (Creative Thinking) and (Successful Team Work). In this post, I will talk about the third objective which is (Positive Energy).

In fact, this objective is targeted by all government organizations since H.H sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al-Maktoom Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai directed all people to concentrate on this objective because it will support productivity and achievements.

What is positive energy? It is a feeling coming to a person that makes him productive, happy, satisfied and motivated. This positive energy has different sources and we tried to make the creativity room one of these sources for our employees.

We – as creativity room team – thought of putting this objective for the room to support our organization (DEWA) in achieving this objective. Also, we saw that positive energy is very important for all employees since the load of work is increasing always and the obstacles are more and more every day.  Therefore,  if there is not enough positive energy in the employee, he or she might not continue to achieve targets or let us say: he may not reach the level that the organization is expecting him to be.

The concept of positive energy is not that easy to be implemented for a room. Most people link getting positive energy with appreciations and rewards, so having other perspectives was a challenge for us to implement in the room.

We started to think of the ways to serve this objective. What will provide positive energy for an employee when he enters the room? The first thing we thought of was the environment of the room. A different environment will surely spread some positive energy for the employee especially bright and vibrant colors.

This is what actually we noticed when we opened the room and conducted activities; we saw most of the employees are feeling differently when entering the room. Another thing which we are doing is that after each activity, we are giving the participants an evaluation sheet to measure mainly three things (Satisfaction, Happiness and benefits) which are directly linked with positive energy. The results are excellent which means that employees are happy and gaining positive energy.

In the following posts Insha’Allah, I will mention more examples about how we are targeting this important objective. Until that time, see you Insha’Allah J

More Examples of Successful Team Work Activities

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(More Examples of Successful Team Work Activities)

I’m still writing about examples of activities that will support the objective of successful team work in creativity room. In this post, I will mention two more examples which are Helium Stick and Lego.

Helium Stick is a very interesting game. It is all about applying successful elements of team work if the team wants to achieve the target. The game will start with the team members standing in two rows opposite to each other and a thin stick will be provided to them where they are required to hold it with their fingers.

The objective of the game is to put the stick on the ground with the condition that the stick should be always touching the fingers of the participants.

In this game, it is very important to have the following elements:

       - A leader, 

             - A clear plan how to achieve the target,

             - Harmony among all members, otherwise; they will not achieve the target at all,

             - Flexibility on the plan in case they are not able to achieve the target,

             - Effective communication between members,

             - Finally, each member should focus on his or her task first rather than watching what others are doing..

Following these elements will lead to success and personally I saw great teams which achieved the target for less than 10 min.

The second activity is Lego which is a very famous game and it is a very powerful tool to learn successful team work elements.

We provide the team a subject (can be word or sentences) and request them to represent this subject as a shape using Lego parts. Many great ideas are generated, but most important is that team work is clearly shown.

In this game , it is very important to have the following elements:

- Leader should be assigned,

- A clear plan should be done,

- Role distribution between members should be assigned,

- Time management should be applied,

- Finally, Effective communication between members. 

These are some examples of how we are learning successful team elements. We are doing our best to implement what we learn in these activities in our work and life.

See you in next post Insha’Allah J

Examples of Successful Team Work Activities

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(Examples of Successful Team Work Activities)

In the last post, I wrote about the second objective of creativity room which is (Successful Team Work) and I mentioned that I will provide some examples of the activities which we are running in the room to serve this objective.

Before I start to provide examples, I want to state that some activities which are provided in the room are serving more than one objective, sometimes two or three objectives. That means that the same objective will be used to learn successful team work, creative thinking and positive energy.

For the successful team work, we have number of activities provided in the room. The first one is called (Carpet and colored balls) where participants will be provided with a carpet which has colored holes. Each team member will be holding the carpet from one side and the objective will be ensuring the balls would fall in their related colored hole.

There are five levels in this game. In every level, the number of balls will be increased according to that level (Level 1 = 1 ball, level 2 = 2 balls, level 3 = 3 ball…etc.). The team will be given 10 minutes to complete the five levels.

Where is the team work in this activity? The team can’t success without following successful team work elements. I want to state also that we concentrate on certain elements of successful team work when running any activity related to team work. These elements are:

·         - Leadership (Selection and effectiveness of the team leader).

·        -  Effective Communication between members.

·         - Role Distribution between members.

·         - Planning and setting clear objectives and target.

·         - Time Management.

Many other elements are discussed during the activity also, but we concentrate more on the above and ensure that they are applied in the game.

Personally, I noticed that successful teams followed the above elements while the teams which failed missed some of the elements.

This activity is so exciting and enjoyable. At the same time, it is a powerful tool to learn the successful team work elements.

More examples of activities will be in the next post Insha’Allah J

Creativity Room Objectives - Part 2

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(Creativity Room Objectives -2)

I started from last post to write about the objectives of Creativity Room. I want to remind all that our first objective for the room which I wrote about in my last post was (Creative Thinking).

In this post, I will mention the second main objective which we are concentrating on in the creativity room which is (Successful Team Work).

Why we chose this objective? We believe that Successful Team Work is one of main keys for Success in life and work whether in small or big projects. Individuals can think, suggest and perform some task, but surely they wouldn’t perform and achieve like a success team.

Also, UAE & Dubai government beside our organization (DEWA) are concentrating on team work, so we saw that this objective is important to be set for our room.

It is not only about team work, but it is successful team work. We thought about the ways of delivering this objective to staff. First, we agreed to set the elements of a successful team work. We knew that there are many, but we chose the following: Leadership, communication, Role Distribution, Planning & Time Management.

When we conduct any activity concentrating on team work, we ensure that these elements are delivered to staff. Personally, when I run an activity and notice that one element is missing, usually the team doesn’t succeed or achieve the target.

After each activity, we always inform teams while discussing with them the benefits of the activity that theory part is important, but implementing these theories is more important.

I saw many times teams starting without assigning a leader and, after several failures, they realize that leader is important. The same applies to other elements also like communication or time management.

On the other hand, there are great teams which start with assigning a leader and have good planning and usually their results will be better unless they didn’t apply their plan or missed any of the important elements.

One of the things which I benefited also is that communication between team is very important. When each person listens to the other, he or she will be closer to success; otherwise, as we say always to teams, “ We are in fish market not creativity room!!!”

In the next post – Insha’Allah – I will mention examples of activities which support this objective.

Until that time, see you Insha’Allah J

Creativity Room Objectives - Part 1

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(Creativity Room Objectives -1)

(Great Projects started with an idea)

I totally agree with this statement and I believe that this idea should be a creative one.

When we started to think about the objectives of the creativity room, we thought about: what are the most important things that will improve the employee and the organization? What are the things that government is concentrating on during this period? We saw that one of the main things is (Creative Thinking).

Creative Thinking means thinking in different way, generating new ideas, using certain thinking tools...etc. We tried to see what we can offer to employees to help them learn creative thinking.

We realized that this objective is very important since almost all organizations in the world care about ideas. In fact, creative ideas are one of the main elements for development of any organization and the most challenge that organizations face these days is creating and implementing more creative ideas. Anyone can see the result of these creative ideas in social media programs.

We thought of many tools to support this objective in our creativity room. We realized that learning how to think in creative way is important, so we offered a program called (Idea Generation) which will teach how to use some creative thinking tools like SCAMPER and Random Input.

Also, training the brain to generate ideas is important, so we planned to do that through a famous technique called (Six Hat) where participants will train themselves to think in different perspectives compared to what they are normally used to.

Also, it is important to represent the idea in different ways, so we planned for a program called (Imagine and Draw) where the participants will try to represent a drawing for some words or sentences on window glass which is quite abnormal to many people.

We also used the famous game (Lego) which will also support in representing things in creative way. Furthermore, I don’t want to forget our small library which is called (Creativity Culture) which will support the theoretical part of creative thinking.

Creative thinking is a large subject which can be provided in many different ways. We tried our best to offer this concept in different ways so that the employees will benefit as maximum as possible. We also believe that this is a continuous process, so we need always to think about new ways.

See in next post Insha’Allah J.

What is Creativity Room?

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

(What is Creativity Room?)

‘Creativity Room’ is one of my biggest achievements that I’m extremely proud of. I learnt from it very much in all stages such as planning, execution, running activities, working with team…etc. As I indicated in the last post, my objective from this blog is to share my personal experience from this room with others for the benefit of everyone.

What is Creativity Room? This question might be in mind of many people reading this blog. The pictures may indicate what this room is, but in reality, it is something different. The environment of the room is totally different from normal rooms; the design, the colors, the tools and the activities all support creativity.

To answer the question above, initially, it is important to know how the idea came to my mind. Actually, during the period in 2013, his Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (UAE Vice President, Prime Minister & Ruler of Dubai) launched something called (Creativity Lab) which was concentrating on conducting brainstorming sessions in a different environment. As a result, I thought about having something similar in our workplace but not limited to brainstorming sessions.

I provided the idea in the suggestion system and, at the same time, our department head had the same idea in mind.  Thus, the idea had full support and I was assigned to be the leader for establishing the room.

Note: One of the most important key success points for establishing the room was the leadership support and I will talk about it in coming posts.

The target was to establish a room with different environment than normal rooms so that employees will feel the difference when they enter the room. When I started searching in the internet to see if there are any similar ‘Creativity Rooms’ available in the world, I noticed that most companies which have creativity rooms are limiting it to meeting rooms. Moreover, the other place which was found to be closer to the concept of ‘Creativity Room’ was nurseries!!! It was really a challenge.

The different thing about creativity room which makes it distinguished – in my point of view – is that the room has specific objectives which are focused on Creative Thinking, Successful Team Work and Positive Energy.

Next post will elaborate more about these objectives. See you in the next post Insha’Allah :)

What is this blog about?

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

What is this blog about?

(WOW!!!), (Amazing!!!), (Nice Environment), (Something Different).

These kinds of phrases are mostly heard when anyone enters the “Creativity Room”. The environment and arrangement of the room forces someone to have such a responses.

I’m very proud that I suggested this idea to be implemented in our organization, Dubai Electricity & Water Authority – DEWA. I’m even more proud that this suggestion became real with the support of Allah, my God, then the support of great leaders and colleagues in our organization.

You may be wondering by now what the “Creativity Room” is. Well, I will be explaining about it in next blogs (Insha’Allah).

Personally, I learnt many things from this room starting from the first stage of this project until now and I’m still learning as the room is continuing to provide services and activities to people.

I wanted really to transfer these benefits and lessons to others, so the idea of this blog came into my mind. I will try my best to share whatever I learnt in this room so that all readers can gain the positive values and energy like what myself and whoever enter the room do.

Also, one of my objectives in life is to spread positivity in the world and this room has many positive things that one can learn from and spread it to others.

All what I will write in this blog is personal views and opinions and not related to the organization.

In short, I hope that the readers benefit from this blog and it will be my pleasure to receive any comments or suggestions regarding what is published in this blog.

I will let you know with some pictures of the room…