How to Set Up a Creative War Room

Foster creativity with a war room. A ‘war room’ is the creative, idea planning meeting room with a twist that every business could benefit from. Google Ventures first came up with the idea by focusing on what makes them work more efficiently and developing solutions from it. Once set up, they found it was one of the most essential spaces in their office.

What problems can a war room solve?

Creating a war room is possible on any budget and will help to overcome a variety of workspace problems, such as:

•    Short term memory. Any business that involves creative thinking will need the capability to track many people and variables. Unfortunately, our short term memory isn’t very good, but our spatial memory is amazing. Knowing where information is makes it easier to recall.

•    Verbal ideas don’t stick. Generating and making decisions verbally can easily slip through the cracks and get forgotten. Re-order ideas and priorities with sticky notes around the room.

•    Shared understanding. Without referring back to the spreadsheet hidden somewhere on your desktop, or that email in a forgotten folder, its difficult to understand what everyone in your team has done, is doing or will be executing in the future.

With this in mind, ensure you take a moment to identify any other common issues in your office. Does your meeting room get used as much as you would like it to? Do people tend to have creative talks in the middle of the office? Use these as a foundation for creating your war room.

How to set up a war room

If you don’t have a room available to transform into a war room, then make one! Office partitions or glass office partitions are a cost effective solution for creating a room of any size or shape. Office partitioning can be relocatable and placed anywhere in the office to contribute to an office layout that promotes productivity.

With your office partitions set up and the room ready to be filled, make it an official war room by:

•    Creating lots of surface area. White boards are the holy grail for creative thinking; consider floor to ceiling white boards or a couple freestanding. Put everything you need reminding of on the walls including storyboards, sketches, project ideas, deadlines etc. Idea Paint can be applied to the office partitions so that they double as whiteboard walls.

•    Use sticky notes everywhere else. Windows, doors, tables and any other surface area you can find is a place to develop ideas.

•    Flexible furniture means flexible work modes. Sometimes people may want to chat about ideas, hold meetings or need to draw on a desk. A war room has light furniture that’s fully movable. As the office partitions are relocatable, the war room is flexible too.

•    Decorate it to evoke creativity. Certain colours are great for evoking positive emotions or increasing productivity.  This great infographic details the impact of colour on emotion in the workplace.

The best part of a war room is the potential to experiment and find what works for your team. Set up your war room today with relocatable office partitions from Applied Workplace. Contact us on 01202 577 776 or Email Us to speak to a friendly member of our team today.