The Vice President of Logistics asked me to meet. I had been advising this international company on strategic planning, and had gotten to know Keith during the process. He wanted to talk about a team he was on, charged with finding new ways to achieve the company’s revenue, profit and strategy objectives.
“Stan, we’ve put together this task team, made of both senior leaders and more junior professionals from every major function in the company. It’s a good group of people,” he explained. “Our challenge is to find new ways to increase sales, reduce costs and improve our strategic positioning in the market.”
“That’s quite a charter,” I said. “What can I help with?”
“Well, we’re having some difficulty coming up with solutions, and I thought you might be able to help us find our creative spark,” Keith said.
“What have you done so far?” I asked.
Keith outlined how the team was formed, with three co-leaders, one of which was himself. He described its agenda, weekly updates, assignment of who was to coordinate input and various individual responsibilities. He showed me the meeting minutes from the first couple of sessions, very detailed summaries of the discussions held. The standing agenda was about ten items long, and included briefings on relevant information necessary for the group to keep abreast of company developments, as well as a review of the minutes from the prior meeting. I asked how long the meetings were, and Keith said about two hours. As I looked at the summary of the first two sessions, as well as the agenda, the impediments to creativity were apparent.
To be creative, a group of people formed for that expressed purpose must first contain at least a few members who are inventive. And while one might assert that every person has some level of creativity, I would suggest that truly innovative people, who can produce solutions with incomplete information and limited time, are a minority in the population. Keith’s group might not have the critical mass of creative talent necessary. This is the most fundamental flaw in all brainstorming efforts. The fact is, not that many people have the innate talent for bisociation.
Arthur Koestler, a Rennaissance man born in 1901, was a thinker of grand proportions. While his trade was journalism and his political leanings quite a bit to the left (he was a Communist Party member in Nazi Germany), he coined a definition of creativity that stands today. He said that creativity is the ability to take disparate elements and join them in a way that is not obvious from the nature of their characteristics. This definition has been applied by psychologists ever since, especially in the realm of problem solving.
Another common definition of creativity is the physical production of a thing (painting, sculpture, device, method, process) that has no precedent. Before it existed in the imagination of the creator, there was no such thing in the world. Again, humans who can bisociate or initiate heretofore unknown ideas are not a large segment of the population.
The next requirement for a group comprised of at least a few creative people to be creative is formlessness. The degree to which a group must follow particular processes, procedures and conventions of interaction is the degree to which pure creativity is dampened. Creativity is unrestrained, eccentric and unconcerned with rules. New ideas are generated from new states of mind, not from the same state of mind that created the need for the new idea. Einstein famously offered that axiom. Keith’s team was following very detailed and disciplined processes, which served only to reduce the chances for new thinking, by confining thought and being mentally engaged in the structure of the problem.
Another key ingredient to the inventive “soup” is playfulness. And playfulness is repressed in the presence of fear or caution. So an employee who is attending a problem-solving meeting with others who are higher on the hierarchy, possibly including immediate management, feels a natural tendency to be cautious. The managers can act in ways to reduce this anxiousness, or increase it, of course. Left untreated however, most people will be reticent to risk censure over a wild notion. Playful people aren’t concerned about censure, and are therefore more likely to take the risks associated with invention and brainstorming.
Following closely behind playfulness is the need for absurdity, or outlandishness. The best brainstorming sessions I’ve seen were essentially contests to see who could come up with the most audacious or fanciful idea, assuming no limitations of practicality. Out of a hundred whacky ideas, one or two might survive later evaluation. But without the crazy suggestions, there wouldn’t be those two. If people are laughing out loud, or wide-eyed at how bizarre the thoughts are, then you know that you have enough playfulness to generate those precious few new ideas that might actually be worthwhile.
I suggested to Keith that he identify who in the company really has the creative spark, remove the management members and take the detailed prescription of interaction out of the team’s activities. An outside facilitator can also be helpful in keeping the interactions playful and open, as long as the facilitator doesn’t make the all-too-common mistakes of wanting to lead the group or add his/her own ideas, and thus relinquish the role of facilitator. A facilitator is an enzyme, not a reagent, as one biotech executive I knew once said. The facilitator is not “used” in the group’s reaction, but causes the group to merge, producing something new in the process.
Even with the design described here, I have found no way to guarantee creativity. It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. But the baby needs a Dad, too. And the metaphorical father in this case is an unpredictable rascal who hates to be nailed down by rules and expectations.