Hypnosis for Innovation, alone and as a team
Another creativity workshop. Sticky notes on the wall, the same three people talking, and a winning idea that looks a lot like last year's.
Hypnosis does not supply ideas. It can help a person, or a team, turn down the volume on what eliminates them too early: fear of being wrong, the way others look at you, the habit of answering fast.
Alone, this is worked on in session. As a team, it is worked on in a workshop. This article explains what you can expect, and what the research does not allow anyone to claim.
Why Innovation gets stuck
Innovating rarely takes more intelligence. Mostly it takes letting an imperfect idea live long enough to see what it is worth. That is exactly what working life discourages: it rewards the quick answer, the solid file, the mistake avoided.
Alone: the idea eliminated before it exists
You have a hunch in a meeting, and you keep it to yourself. You do not have the numbers yet, it sounds naive, someone has surely tried it. Three months later, a competitor launches it.
This filter is useful: it is what gives your work its quality when the time comes to check and decide. The trouble is its timing. It shows up before the idea instead of after it. We cover this for creators in Hypnosis for Artistic Creativity, and for experts who dare not rely on what they perceive in Hypnosis for Developing Intuition.
As a team: what the meeting does to ideas
A group does not always produce more than the sum of its members. In a now classic series of experiments, Diehl and Stroebe showed that people looking for ideas together come up with fewer than the same number of people looking separately. The main cause is very simple: only one person speaks at a time, and while waiting your turn you forget or give up.
Nobody notices. Paulus and Dzindolet observed that most people believe they produce more in a group, and that group members tend to align with each other's level.
The way others look at you counts too. Amy Edmondson studied 51 teams in a manufacturing company: teams where people feel safe taking an interpersonal risk (asking a naive question, flagging a mistake, offering a fragile idea) learn more. A team that stays quiet is not a team without ideas.
When the block is a symptom.
"I have no ideas left, I don't feel like doing anything" can point to exhaustion or a depressive episode rather than a lack of creativity. If this has lasted at least two weeks, with disturbed sleep, sadness or a loss of drive, talk to a doctor.
Canada: 988. Quebec: Info-Social 811, option 2. France: 3114.
What this block costs day to day
For you, it is a particular kind of tiredness. Having an opinion and swallowing it, spending days on a proposal that will never come out, approving other people's project while knowing what is wrong with it. Over time, you stop looking. For a team, it is convergence that comes too soon. The first acceptable idea wins, because it comes from the most listened-to person or because everyone wants to leave the room. The less comfortable ideas are never heard, and nobody will know they existed.
For the company, the cost shows up late. Products that look alike, projects that improve what exists without ever questioning it, talented people who keep their best ideas for later.
What helps, apart from Hypnosis
These levers are often simpler than a workshop, and they should come first.
- Write separately before speaking. This is the most direct answer to the research on groups: collect the ideas first, discuss them afterwards.
- Separate the time for producing from the time for judging. Not in the same hour, and if possible not on the same day.
- Let things rest. A meta-analysis by Sio and Ormerod finds a positive effect of incubation on problem solving, stronger when many ideas have to be produced. An undemanding task during the break helps more than an absorbing one.
- Let the least listened-to speak first, and the most senior person speak last.
- Treat a failed idea as information. The tone a manager takes at the first mistake decides what the team will dare to do next.
Hypnosis comes on top of these practices, on the side of your inner state: what goes on in you at the moment of proposing, listening or not knowing.
Video available in French
Video transcript
Innovation and hypnosis: thinking outside the pattern. People often say that innovation means thinking differently. But nobody says how to stop thinking the way you have always thought. Because the problem is not a lack of ideas, it is the invisible architecture that filters what can emerge.
The brain is a prediction machine. It prefers the familiar, the known, the safe. It is a bit like survival mode, which works very well, since we are still here after thousands of years. Except when you want to innovate, because innovating means asking the brain to betray its own patterns.
Hypnosis works on what researchers call implicit cognitive schemas. Those automatic filters you never consciously chose, but which determine what you perceive as possible. The process in hypnosis is not to give you ideas, it is to temporarily suspend the guard who decides which ones deserve to exist.
It is a little like removing a prism in front of a light. The light was already there. What changes is the way it breaks apart. Innovation does not come from outside. It comes from that place in you where you have not looked yet.
Hypnotherapy is a complementary form of support and does not replace medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns about your health, please consult a physician first.
Hypnosis for Innovation one to one
Let us start with what hypnosis does not do. It will not hand you the idea of the century. It replaces neither your expertise, nor your client research, nor the work of verification. A strong impression in session is not a business decision.
What this support aims at
- Holding the censor at a distance during exploration, without removing it: it returns when the time comes to sort.
- Tolerating uncertainty better. Staying with an open question a few more days, rather than taking shelter in the first presentable answer.
- Daring to say what you think, in a meeting, before a committee, in front of your executives. This connects with work on self-confidence.
- Revisiting from a distance a failure that still weighs on you: the cancelled project, the proposal that was mocked, the promotion that turned on one mistake.
- Finding a state of absorbed attention again, useful for thinking about one problem for a long time, and learning it through self-hypnosis so you do not depend on a session.
How a session goes
The interview comes first. Your line of work, what you want to move forward, and the exact moment it gets stuck. The goal stays small and concrete: bring one idea to the next meeting, pick up a project set aside.
Then comes the work in hypnosis, a natural state of focused attention: you stay conscious and you can stop whenever you wish. You leave with an exercise to do alone, often just before getting down to work.
The number of sessions is set during the first interview. If your request is more about your position or your career path, our Professional Hypno-Coaching page is a better fit.
Hypnosis for Innovation in groups
A workshop does not try to hypnotize a team into being creative. It teaches the team to move from one mode to another: from the mode that evaluates and defends to the mode that explores. Same people, same skills, in a different state of attention. The work is not on the ideas themselves, which remain the team's, but on the conditions that let them come out. Nobody arrives with the solution: you are the ones who know your trade and your clients.
What a workshop can include
- Understanding the mechanism. What research says about groups, the inner censor, the fear of being judged. Many teams recognize their own meetings.
- A guided moment, eyes closed or not, to release the tension of the day and hold a work question without trying to answer it right away.
- Individual, written idea production, right after that guided moment, before any discussion.
- Pooling without judgment, then sorting, at another time, under other rules.
- A short self-hypnosis exercise that everyone can use again before a working session.
Our rules for a company workshop
Participation is voluntary. Anyone can listen without joining the exercise, or stop along the way, with no need to explain.
Nothing personal is asked, and nothing is reported to the employer. The workshop deals with no one's personal situation and evaluates no one.
It is not a show. Nobody is put on display in front of colleagues, and nobody does anything against their will.
It is not an answer to an organizational problem. A workshop will make up for neither an excessive workload nor a damaged climate. If that is the issue, we will tell you before starting.
What the research says
To be direct: we found no controlled study on hypnosis and innovation at work. What follows is therefore reasoning built on neighbouring work, not proof of effectiveness.
On creativity, the data are thin. A 2007 randomized trial on drawing concludes that a hypnotic procedure had a favourable effect. It involved students and an artistic task, very far from a product development team.
On mood, the effect exists and stays modest. A meta-analysis of 25 years of research links positive, activating states with slightly higher creativity. It says nothing about hypnosis, but it supports the idea that an inner state affects the production of ideas.
On hypnosis in groups, the work concerns stress. A multicentre German trial of 95 stressed people observed lower perceived stress after a programme of five group sessions. It was not a study of innovation, not a workplace intervention and not a single workshop.
In other words, we know fairly well what holds ideas back in a group, and much less about what a hypnosis workshop changes. An honest description of a workshop is an experiment, and we prefer to say so.
Organizing a workshop in your company
Do you lead a marketing, product development or management team, and would you like to try something other than one more workshop? Tell us about your team, what you are trying to unblock and what you have already tried. We will look with you at whether a workshop makes sense and how to build it. If it does not meet your need, we will tell you. Everything is prepared with you in advance: the goals, the participants and the framework.
Write to us to organize a workshop
For one-to-one support, our practitioners see clients in Montreal, Sherbrooke, Gatineau, Paris and Lille, and by video wherever you are in the world. You can book an appointment directly.
Frequently asked questions about Hypnosis for Innovation
No, and be wary of anyone who promises it. A useful idea comes from your trade, your clients and your knowledge of the subject. Hypnosis aims at something else: helping each person let out what they think before censoring it, and tolerate doubt better during the stretch when nothing is settled yet.
A one-to-one session starts from your situation: what holds you back, when, and what you want to change. A workshop deals with shared tools and with the way the group produces its ideas. It addresses no one in particular, and nothing personal is asked of anyone.
No. Taking part in a hypnosis exercise stays voluntary. Anyone can listen without joining in, stop at any time or step out of the exercise, with no need to explain and without it being reported to anyone.
No. Hypnosis as we practise it has nothing to do with a stage show. It is a state of focused attention: you stay conscious, you hear everything, and you say and do nothing you have not decided to.
Not for innovation at work: we found no controlled study on the subject. A few older experiments point in the right direction for creativity, in students, and research on groups sheds good light on the mechanisms. That is a sound line of reasoning, not proof, and we prefer to say so.
It is the wrong tool. A workshop does not fix an excessive workload or an organization that wears people down, and it does not replace medical care. If people are unwell, their first contact is their doctor, and within the company, occupational health services.
Sources and references
On groups and ideas
- Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: toward the solution of a riddle. Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1987). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497-509.
- Social influence processes in group brainstorming. Paulus, P. B., & Dzindolet, M. T. (1993). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(4), 575-586.
- Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Edmondson, A. (1999). Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
On creativity
- Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94-120.
- A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research. Baas, M., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Nijstad, B. A. (2008). Psychological Bulletin, 134(6), 779-806.
On hypnosis
- Hypnotic enhancement of creative drawing. Council, J. R., Bromley, K. A., Zabelina, D. L., & Waters, C. G. (2007). International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 55(4), 467-485.
- Group hypnosis for stress reduction and improved stress coping: a multicenter randomized controlled trial. Fisch, S. et al. (2020). BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 20, 344.
Related articles
- On the artist's block, see Hypnosis for Artistic Creativity.
- On what you perceive without being able to justify it, see Hypnosis for Developing Intuition.
- On mental preparation, see Hypnosis for Performance.
Hypnosis as practised by the members of Solutions Hypnose is a complementary support approach. It is neither a medical act, nor a diagnosis, nor psychotherapy in the regulatory sense, and it in no way replaces a consultation, follow-up or treatment prescribed by a health professional.
Our practitioners do not assess and do not treat mental disorders or illnesses. They never ask for an ongoing treatment to be stopped or changed: that decision rests exclusively with your doctor.
No result can be guaranteed. The testimonials and examples presented on this page describe individual experiences and do not predict what you will experience.
In case of significant distress, unexplained physical symptoms or suicidal thoughts, contact a doctor, emergency services or a helpline without delay.
Page written by Sandra Djina Ravalia
hypnotherapist and art therapist
partner at Solutions Hypnose.
English version reviewed by David Veilleux
Published .