How creative are you when something personal is on the line? Imagine somebody you want to be remembered by needs to learn your name — and you have one shot to make it stick. What do you do?

For almost two decades, I have built a small creativity course ritual around exactly that question. It is called Say My Name, and today, let me share how it works, why it works, and the four levels of creativity I have watched master’s students and workshop delegates unleash to win it.

A Confession from Your Creativity Facilitator

Let me start with a confession: I am not great with names.

I am an Ideator profile in TIPS, Thinkergy’s talent & innovator profiling system, which assesses preferred thinking styles and other working preferences. When it comes to the interaction style, Ideators sit roughly halfway on the spectrum between high IQ and high EQ — strong on both, but not exceptional on either. We are also Brain-dominant in our work style, which is a polite way of saying our heads tend to be in the clouds. Mid-conversation — while you are still introducing yourself — my restless, impatient mind may have already wandered off to a problem I am quietly solving in the background. As Einstein observed: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” True — and occasionally inconvenient when you are trying to remember the name of the person standing right in front of you.

Compounding the issue: at a typical Thinkergy workshop or university course, I face twenty to thirty delegates at once. Multiply that by hundreds of cohorts over more than twenty years, and you arrive at thousands of names I have been responsible for learning. The math becomes overwhelming.

For years, this was simply my problem to manage. Then one day, I had a small Eureka: why not turn my problem into your opportunity?

Action Tags and the Innovation Formula

To explain the game, I first need to explain the currency.

In every creativity class and Thinkergy workshop, I award something I call Action Tags — small tokens earned for taking valuable, learning-positive action: answering a question with depth, presenting for your team, returning punctually from a break, contributing a strong idea, any concrete move that pushes the group forward.

Why? Because the simplest definition of innovation we use at Thinkergy is the Innovation Formula:

Creativity + Action = Innovation.

You can be the most imaginative person in the room, but if you never take action, you will never produce a single innovation. Action Tags gamify the second half of the formula. They generate a friendly peer pressure — “Wait, you have how many already? I need to step up!” — that nudges people out of their comfort zone. And the comfort zone, as Goethe knew, is where breakthroughs go to die. “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it,” he advised. “Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

One of the easiest ways to earn Action Tags early is by playing Say My Name.

The Rules of the Game

The brief I give every cohort is short, and the pressure is real:

This is your first chance to express your creativity. Your job is to make sure Dr. D learns your name by the end of the course. Find a creative way to make it impossible for me to forget your name. Be unique and original. You have time until the end of the course.

Action Tags are awarded on a 1-to-6 scale, from "it sucks" up to "WOW!" The more memorable, the more sensory, the more daring the move — the higher you score.

Over the years, I have observed essentially four levels of creative response. Let me walk you through them.

Level 1 — Action Without Creativity

One delegate once walked up to me on day one, smiled politely, and handed me his business card.

That was it.

I awarded him one Action Tag. Why? Because he took action. He did something — and in the Innovation Formula, action is non-negotiable. But the creativity component was, let's say, dormant. A business card is what you do when you have not yet asked yourself the question. It is the response you give when being remembered has not yet become a creative challenge worth attacking.

Lesson: Always show up — but treat showing up as the floor, never the ceiling. The Innovation Formula needs both halves.

Level 4 — Make It Sensory and Sticky

Three students whose names and faces I remember well operated at this level.

A student of mine called Tangmo brought a slice of watermelon into class one day and served it to me. Tangmo in Thai means watermelon. The taste, the smell, the bite — a multisensory association locked her name into my memory in a single afternoon.

Another student called Bo walked up with a length of ribbon, tied a small bow around my wrist, and said: “My name is Bow.”

A third student approached me, dropped a Mercedes-Benz car key into my palm, and said: “By the way, I'm Benz.”

Each of these moves involved a small but real creative leap — connecting a name to a sensory object, a physical gesture, or a wordplay. Leonardo da Vinci said it cleanly: “The five senses are the ministers of the soul. Yet, the average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking.” These three students multi-sensorily connected their name to something the room could see, touch, or taste — and so I remembered them.

Lesson: A sensory creative twist beats a polite introduction every time.

Level 6 — Dare to WOW Me

The top of the scale is reserved for students and delegates bold enough to take a real risk.

Some years ago, I walked into my classroom, set my MacBook Pro on the instructor's desk, and lowered myself onto the chair. I leapt up instantly with a yell  —“Ouch!” — sharp pain in my behind. A young Thai woman ran over with a contrite smile and said: “I'm so sorry, Ajarn — my name is Pin.” On the chair: a row of office corkboard pins, points up. Bold? Yes. Painful? Also yes. But unforgettable in a way no introduction could ever be. Six Action Tags, no hesitation.

The second story comes from an X-IDEA workshop we ran for Kimberly-Clark. On the morning of day two, a young lady approached me, looking distressed: “Dr. D, have you seen my shoe?” I had not. She asked again. I still had not. Then, with a wide grin: “By the way, my name is Cinderella.” Six Action Tags.

Years later, I bumped into her by chance in a Bangkok shopping mall. Without missing a beat, I greeted her: “Hi, Cindy.”

That is the test that matters. Not whether I remember your name on day three, but whether I remember it on year five.

Level 2 — Take Action, but Don't Just Copy

Now that you have met Cinderella, let me tell you about Frank.

A few years ago, while teaching at a university in another country, I made a small instructor's mistake: when explaining the game, I shared the Cinderella story as one example of what a great move could look like.

The next morning, a student walked up to me with great seriousness and said: "Dr. D, Dr. D — did you see my bag?"

I paused. "No, I didn't see your bag. Why?"

He smiled and announced: "By the way, my name is Frank."

Ouch!

I gave Frank two Action Tags and gently encouraged him to try again with something of his own. Two — not one — because he did take action, and action is the non-negotiable half of the Innovation Formula. But the creative connection between bag and Frank simply did not exist. He had borrowed the shape of someone else's move without doing any of the creative work — and that gap is the difference between imitation and originality.

I do not blame Frank. He is the product of an education system that rewards rote learning and conformity over original thought. As Mark Twain quipped: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Frank had a decade of schooling to unlearn in real time. So I gave him a second chance — and that is the spirit in which the game is played.

Lesson: Stop copying other people's creative moves. Start finding your own connection.

What the Game Is Really Teaching

The Pin story has a sequel, too. After that trimester, I invited her to join our Thinkergy event crew for a major X-IDEA Innovation Project with Nestlé (Thai) that fielded over a hundred delegates from 11 product categories — which we served with a large event crew of more than a dozen Thinkergy team members. Why did I invite Pin? Anyone bold enough to play that game on her own instructor was someone I wanted on my team — creative, action-oriented, unafraid.

Say My Name is, on the surface, a small classroom ritual. Underneath, it is a microcosm of how innovation actually happens. Stop hiding inside conventional introductions. Start engineering moments that connect, surprise, and stick. Action makes you noticed. Creativity makes you unforgettable.

So if you ever find yourself in a Thinkergy workshop or one of my creativity classes — what would your creative move be? The one that still has me greeting you by name in a shopping mall, ten years from now?

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2026.

• Curious what it feels like to play this game in person? Bring a Thinkergy creativity workshop to your team — and find out which of your colleagues has a Pin or a Cinderella in them. Contact us to find out about our creativity training workshops.
• Curious whether you're an Ideator like me — or a different creative profile? Discover your thinking style with TIPS, Thinkergy's talent and innovator profiling system. Buy a TIPS test coupon and take the TIPS assessment.
• Want to go deeper on the Innovation Formula? Then check out Section 2.3, "The Innovation Formula," in my Unleashing WOW! book.