Strategy Survival Guide

Encouraging creativity
In Practice: SU Alcohol Misuse Project
Creativity techniques can be helpful not only in generating new ideas, but also in approaching existing
material in fresh and innovative ways. On the Alcohol project, for example, techniques were used by the
team to ensure that the narrative of the Interim Analytical Report was clear, coherent, and accessible to a
non-specialist audience.
In order to crystallise the key points emerging from the report, the team set itself two exercises:
• ‘Texting Tony’- where team members were required to summarise the report in writing, in the form
of ten short sentences, as if they were sending a series of text messages to the Prime Minister;
and
• the Lift test - where team members were required to summarise the report orally, in two minutes,
as if they were giving the Prime Minister an overview of its findings in a lift journey.
The discipline of these exercises encouraged the team to isolate the headline findings emerging from their
work. These headlines were subsequently used to structure the analytical report and its communications
strategy.
Strategy Survival Guide – Strategy Skills
Page 60