When you're trying to find an innovative solution to a problem,
how often do you find yourself talking about it with the same old
group of people? Perhaps it's your immediate team, or the people
you regularly deal with at your client or partner organisations. If
you're like most people, the answer is probably a lot of the
time.
I regularly ask this question to groups that I address in
speaking engagements and typically, about two thirds of the room
indicate that this sums up their typical approach to problem
solving. And I too have been guilty of this cardinal sin of
creativity.
I used to work in advertising as a consumer psychologist for
several years and as a result, found myself participating in one
hell of a lot of brainstorms and problem solving workshops. The
typical scenario was thus: we would receive a brief from a client,
one of the account managers would book a meeting for an hour,
invite the usual suspects (that is, the team of people who were
responsible for servicing that client) and we would sit around and
throw ideas at each other. Because most problems we received were
variations of problems we had received in the past, such as "grow
awareness for X", "drive loyalty for Y", the group would typically
rehash or re-spin solutions that were sort of like how we had
solved the problem in the past. And not surprisingly, it was rare
that any strokes of genius came out of such meetings.
Likewise, in these situations, it was fairly typical for ideas
to get shot down before they even had the chance to breath. "But
we've already tried that in the past and it didn't work" or "We
don't have the resources" were phrases that I heard ad nauseam.
However, in other situations, we would invite some 'unusual'
suspects to these meetings - a strategist that had never worked on
the client or category before, someone from the finance department
(because let's face it, it's not often that they get asked to show
their mug in an idea generation session) or someone equally
unexpected. And creativity and great ideas would flourish.
Suddenly, with the new perspective, ideas that the group would
never have usually thought of were being suggested and being given
serious consideration.
The energy in the group was different too. With new faces came
new attitudes and renewed vigour for the problem. It was a much
more enjoyable experience to be a part of.
My case study of one is all well and good, but being a geeky
scientist type, whenever I get a hunch about something, I trawl
through the research journals and see if there is some evidence to
actually back it up. And in this case, there certainly was.
In one such study, Leigh Thompson from Kellogg School of
Management and some other colleagues set out to explore the impact
of group membership on creativity. They suspected that 'open
groups', in which new members were regularly asked to contribute to
the group, would be significantly more innovative than 'closed
groups', in which membership remained the same.
To test their hypothesis, they divided participants into several
three-person groups. Half of these groups were assigned as 'closed
groups', and throughout the brainstorming tasks, group membership
remained the same. The other groups were assigned as 'open groups'.
Halfway through the brainstorming task, the open groups were given
a new group member who would help contribute to the idea generation
task.
Thompson and his colleagues found that the open groups performed
significantly better on the task. They produced more unique ideas
and a greater variety of ideas than did the closed groups. And it
wasn't just the newcomer that was responsible for generating the
ideas. Instead, they found that the newcomer actually triggered
different thoughts and beliefs and ideas in the existing group
members.
Not surprisingly, the researchers concluded that a change is
indeed as good as a holiday when it comes to groups producing
better ideas.
In another study that looked at groups and creativity, some
researchers from Northwestern University were interested in
exploring some relatively high profile teams that already existed
and had been working together for some time. They looked at the
Boston Red Sox, successful Broadway musical teams, and scientific
collaborators, among other teams. And then they examined how
effective their collaboration was.
Not surprisingly, they found that each team had a diverse bunch
of people in it, but it wasn't diversity in gender or age that was
related to breakthrough performance. Instead, the key predictor was
whether the group contained a mix of experienced people who had
been with the team for a while and a bunch of newbies who had less
experience. They discovered that experienced teams who didn't
introduce new members were less likely to perform as effectively in
their creative pursuits.
So, much like Thompson and co, they concluded that having
diverse and changing group members is a key way to drive creativity
and breakthrough innovations.
I believe that these findings (not to mention my case study of
one) have important implications for the type of work I now do with
organisations. A typical project for us at Inventium (an innovation
consultancy I founded a couple of years ago) involves an
organisation approaching us with a problem or opportunity they want
to think more creatively about, such as how they can drive growth
among a particular target group, how they can grow revenue in
category X, and so on. They then ask us to facilitate idea
generation or innovation sessions to produce breakthrough
thinking.
We have a range of tools and techniques that we've developed at
Inventium, all of which are underpinned by what has been proven to
work according to scientific studies. One of the most effective
techniques that consistently produces quite amazing results is one
that we call 'externals'. The concept springs from the number of
studies that have been conducted, such as the aforementioned ones,
that have time and time again shown that having people who are
external or new to the team is a great way of driving creative
solutions.
As such, we always recommend to our clients that we should
invite people who are either external to the team in the
organisation we are working with (eg bringing a finance person into
a marketing team session), or external to the organisation.
We have used this technique with companies such as BP, Vodafone,
Fonterra and Australia Post to deliver breakthrough thinking to
problems that had consumed the team of people tasked with working
on it. The impact of having externals in the room leads thinking in
very left of centre directions which inevitably leads to better
solutions.
The other thing about externals that is important to mention is
that we are incredibly fussy about who we bring into the room. We
don't simply let in any Tom, Dick or Harry (although the Toms,
Dicks and Harrys certainly would have some effect, according to
science). Instead, we deliberately recruit externals who see the
world in a very unique way, are generally working in a creative
profession, such as photography, filmmaking or design, but have had
experience in the corporate world. This means that our externals
produce left of centre thinking that is underpinned with a business
reality.
Due to the popularity of the externals concept with Inventium's
clients, I recently co-founded a group called The Curiosity Hive
that takes the externals concept to the extreme.
The idea for the Curiosity Hive came from the popularity of
externals that we were inviting into workshops and the huge value
they added. Mid last year, I was having a chat to some colleagues
about this and we thought "what if we ran idea generation sessions
in which the externals outnumbered the client?" What if we could
assemble a diverse group of people who were essentially brains for
hire? Kind of like live, real life crowdsourcing.
So we set about recruiting a group of brains with the following
criteria in mind. First, we wanted a diverse mix of backgrounds. We
didn't want 'two' of anything. So we searched for curious and
creative folk from a number of different professions, such as
medicine, architecture, publishing, production, IT, engineering,
research and so on. Second, they had to be curious. Curious about
the world, curious about finding out new things that had no seeming
direct relation to them, and curious about finding better ways of
solving problems. Finally, they needed to have had experience with
the corporate world. We didn't want sculptors who had no idea what
a profit and loss was, for example.
So what we ended up with is a group of diverse, creative and
curious types who have an appreciation for the corporate reality
that underpins many problems clients come to us with. And this
became the foundation of the Curiosity Hive - a bunch of brains for
hire.
To date, the Curiosity Hive has been overwhelmingly popular due
to the novel proposition the group represents and due to many
organisations' desires to look outside their normal world for
innovative thinking. In a recent session with the publishers of The
Big Issue, a street magazine written by professional journalists
and sold by largely homeless people, the organisation tasked the
group with finding solutions to how they could change perceptions
of their organisation. It wanted to get across that it is not a
traditional welfare charity (as many people believe) but rather a
social enterprise that provides sustainable mechanisms that help
people help themselves.
With 10 curious minds and with two hours of idea generation
time, we had around 20 ideas fleshed out (and about 100 ideas in
their infancy). Natalie Susman, marketing and communications
manager at The Big Issue, commented: "We found the workshop
invaluable, walking away with a number of different approaches and
new, creative and entrepreneurial ways to differentiate ourselves
for other not-for-profits, some of which we have started to
implement."
So the next time you identify a problem you need to solve or an
opportunity that you might want to capitalise on, give some serious
thought to the combination of brains you gather in the room. Sure,
pick some of the usual suspects who have the depth of knowledge
around the issue, but try and include a few unusual suspects and
watch creativity blossom.
Dr Amantha Imber is author of The
Creativity Formula and a co-founder of The Curiosity Hive. She
can be reached at: amantha@inventium.com.au
