There are times when you or your staff are feeling less than inspired but creative problem solving is essential. And there are some people— maybe even you—who fear the blank page or any situation in which they must use their creativity (technical term: getting creative-now-o-phobia).

Getting started is often the most difficult part of the creative process. Rather than worrying about the finished project, start by creating sparks. Think of them as embryonic ideas that still need a lot of nurturing before reaching maturity. Don’t worry about the finished project just yet—instead, focus on rough concepts that ultimately can be molded into a final version. Here are five fun techniques that will help generate creative sparks:

The Hot Potato

Just as with the childhood game of hot potato, put everyone in a circle—except for one person who will be taking copious notes. Toss a Nerf football (instead of a potato) to a random person in the group, who is required to shout out one idea for a new or better service you can offer your clients, for example. Anyone who catches the ball has to shout out an idea that’s no more than one sentence long. He or she isn’t allowed to think about it, analyze it, or contemplate his or her phrasing. Each person has to think fast, shoot from the hip, and let the spontaneous creativity fly. This fast-paced exercise creates a situation that removes obstacles, blockers, and fear.

Let the ideas flow for fifteen minutes. Some will be crazy, some will be stupid, and some will be astonishingly brilliant. When people get into the rhythm and let down their guard, beautiful ideas come more naturally.

The Start Ain’t Aways the Start

When most people face a big project, they assume they need to start on ‘‘page one.’’ If you were a writer, for example, you might think your job is to begin your writing process by writing the first page of the book. But staring at that starting point can dampen, rather than ignite, your creativity.

To avoid that dampening effect, remember that there’s a difference between starting to work and a creative project’s beginning. The writer may choose to begin in the middle of the book. A musician may begin her composition with a catchy ending. The creative process need not be linear for either art or business. Try approaching creativity from different points in the project, and you may just uncover some hot new sparks, not to mention overcoming the fear of the blank page.

For example, if you are working to schedule a three-day team offsite, it isn’t necessary to plan the days consecutively. Start where your inspiration leads you, and fill in the rest as you go.

Stick It To The Man

We’ve all felt kicked around at some point in our lives. Perhaps it was the school bully or an overbearing boss or the seemingly unbeatable competition. Here’s your chance to get them back. In this exercise, it is your job to be irreverent. To pick a fight. To shake things up.

To begin, think about your creativity challenge and what you could do to really piss people off. Start with your clients. What ideas would send them into cardiac arrest? Next, move on to your competition.

Think of all the things you could do to stick a thumb in their eye, pour salt in their wounds, and send them off the deep end. Now that you are having fun, don’t stop there. What would create environmental outrage? What would engender a political explosion? Can you think of anything so obnoxious and racy that a riot might ensue? Don’t hold back. Here’s the one time when your goal is to be politically incorrect.

This type of thinking forces you way outside your normal thought process and will help you generate some very wild creative sparks. Once you have a nice list of offensive ideas, look them over to see what inoffensive ideas they trigger. Finding alternatives will be easy. You accomplished the hard part in the midst of your mischievous fun—breaking through old thought patterns and letting your creative abilities shine.

For example, let’s say you are trying to improve customer service. Instead of solving the problem outright, start by finding out what would do the opposite: what would really anger your customers? Bad seating, dim lighting, slower service, and so on. This brainstorming exercise will help you zero in on the customer’s needs and uncover less obvious solutions by putting yourself in the their shoes. You may discover some offensive things you are doing currently, yet are unaware of.

Once you have the “bad” list, try flipping it around and exploring the opposite of each item in order to spark new ideas.

The Time Capsule

Imagine that you and your team have a time machine. When you’re struggling to ignite a creative spark, jump in your time machine and go back fifty years. How would people from that era approach your challenge? What about a hundred years back? Or five hundred years?

Now go forward in your time machine. How would you approach your challenge fifty years in the future? What ideas might you use from the vantage point of a hundred years in the future? With any new technology you can imagine and with a whole host of new competitors, how would your group from the future begin the job at hand?

Shifting your perspective to the future or the past can open up your mind with fresh ideas and help generate some sparks to kick your creative process into high gear.

Dagnabbits

A “dagnabbit” is akin to stubbing your toe. It’s that flash of disappointment or frustration that makes you wish the world were different. (Of course, feel free to substitute any expletive you choose.)

Rather than just getting annoyed and moving on, keep a running list of these moments. Those lists can become one of your greatest sources of creative sparks. In fact, many of the greatest inventions came directly out of dagnabbit moments.

To use dagnabbits to your advantage, start by thinking through, discussing, or observing your target audience in action. Even better, interview people who are deeply embedded in your challenge (this could be customers, colleagues, or investors, depending on what creative problem you are working to solve). What are the natural pain points? Where do people get hung up? What bottlenecks exist? Find the dagnabbits and you will quickly uncover a number of jumping-off points for creativity.

Josh Linkner is the founder and chairman of ePrize and the author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity (Jossey-Bass). Visit joshlinkner.com for more information.