You walk into the conference room to find a long string of tables, laid out in a U-shaped formation. Or maybe there are rows of narrow tables, at each chair, a place-setting of paper and a hotel pen, a small doily rests under each designated water glass. The fluorescent overhead lights buzz, the dark, dirt-hiding carpet ties the room together in a blandly professional way.

It’s going to be one of those meetings, you think, already dreading the next few hours or days that you’ll be sequestered in this room, suffering death by talking head or Powerpoint – or both.

Which is why we try, with the objective of inciting innovation, to create a different kind of meeting experience from the moment you enter the room. The right setting will impact the productivity of a group, the originality of ideas and ultimately the quality of the output of the event.

The optimal room for an innovation workshop probably isn’t in a hotel. It’s in an art gallery, or a science museum, or a funky warehouse space or an innovation lab equipped with all the supplies necessary to induce creative thinking. We counsel our clients to consider an off-the-beaten-track kind of venue when they’re thinking about where to host a workshop; the simple act of turning up at a unique address can get people geared up for being more creative.

Simply finding an exotic setting isn’t enough. Especially with a residential event like a Sandpit or an Ideas Lab, the standard hotel or conference center meeting room is often what we have to work in. In either case, the meeting room has to meet certain specifications. If the room isn’t right, the workshop won’t do what it’s set out to do.

Our wish must list includes:

• A main meeting room twice the size that you’d think necessary.
If your participant count (including facilitators, mentors and visitors) is 30 people, the room ought to seat 60 people banquet style. That leaves empty space for out-of-chair activities and keeps people from feeling penned in. It also adds meters to the available wall space.

• Plenty of wall space. We mean flat, empty walls without paintings, pictures and decorative lighting. We’ll be hanging up flip chart pages and other activities on kraft-paper or butcher-block paper or whatever paper we use to track our work as we move through the process. We want to see everything we’ve done, so we need a lot of unblemished wall space to display it.

• Yet windows for natural light. At least one wall has to have some windows. If the view is green and natural and inspiring, all the better.

• Carpet on the floor. In ways you’d never imagine, the sound of many discussions at once without anything to absorb it can cause fatigue that’s counterproductive. Carpet is a must, even if it’s ugly.

• Round tables around which people can have dynamic small group discussions. Theatre-styled seating is fine for large congresses or a musical performance, but it’s not particularly conducive to creativity. We never seat people in rows when we want them to talk to each other, and even the big U-shaped set-up feels too formal and doesn’t facilitate the kind of intimate idea-sharing that leads to innovation.

• Technology, the latest versions. Projectors that go on and off without endless warm-up periods and noisy fans. Lights that can be raised and dimmed as needed, on command. Audio speakers so we can use music to bring up the energy when it’s too low and bring it down when people are too stressed – or sometimes just for a laugh. Temperature control that’s in our own hands, not the physical plant manager in another wing of the building. And WiFi.

• Yes, WiFi. Although we hope that the workshops we run are so compelling and captivating that people set their smart phones aside, we know that for some people, not checking in is more distracting to them then an occasional interruption. Besides, we often want to get information instantly, or we need to review the literature available on a subject. Not only do we allow wifi, we beg the venues we work in to make it strong and wide enough for everyone to function.

• Break-out rooms rooms where people can work in small groups without being distracted, and a dining room (or designated room) for meals that’s not than the main meeting room. Lounge areas for a casual, comfortable change-of-scenery. Nature nearby, for perspective-building views and incubative walks. It also helps to have a good bar for informal idea generation. Best case scenario: we’re the only event at the venue, so we can take it over every corner.

• Color, warmth and toys. Even with our rearrangements, a meeting room can still feel cold. So we bring colored pens and post-its, small toys for the tables. Sometimes we’ll set up a few guitars and a drum set, or guitar-hero – among other games – ready to go on our Wii station. We have a number of electronic cars, helicopters and hovering machines to distract and delight people during breaks. The objective of these “foolish” accessories is to create an environment where people want to play. We’ve found that fiddling with toys sometimes helps put people in the mood to play with ideas and concepts.

Where you meet sets the mood for your meeting, which is why the space matters. Put people in the same old meeting room and the chances of getting the same old meeting output are pretty good. If it’s a big open room with an inviting seating plan around Arthurian round tables, with long walls of white paper ready to receive hundreds of colorful ideas, it sets an entirely different tone than immovable chairs lined tight and facing forward. If you want to make room for innovation, you have to make the room the kind of place that will invite it.

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Know Further:

Why the round tables? Research on curvilinear furniture on people’s emotions. More about innovation labs, and an inventory of research studies about play.

My daughter’s teacher asked me to help out with a school project, one of the objectives of which is to expose the students to the basic elements of deliberate creativity (before they unlearn everything they know naturally). We started with an exercise about failing. The students were given an easy task but with time pressure. Each time someone failed, we applauded wildly. By the end of the activity, everyone had failed and they all thought it was funny. The bad taste of failure was stripped away, so we could look at it in a new way.

We talked about how in school – often for good reason – failure is something to be avoided. We don’t want to fail our tests; we want to do our best. But that in other situations, failure might not be such an awful outcome, it could even be a positive thing. The consequences of failing could be useful, at the very least we can learn from it. Continue reading »

It happens once or twice a year. An innovation theorist, organizational consultant, or accredited author/blogger writes an article blasting some aspect of the collective creative process. There’s a flurry of responses and rebuttals, and a digging-in of the heels in each camp, those for or against, each with their own case for the best way to induce creative thinking.

The most recent example of this: a New York Times piece The Rise of New Groupthink, in which Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, laments the prevalence of group brainstorming and creative teamwork. While she doesn’t entirely disavow the value of creative collaboration, her premise is that team methodology is counterproductive for introverts, to whom she attributes most creative advances. Continue reading »

A great deal of the work KI does to provoke innovation involves operating in groups and teams. We have nothing against individual genius; in fact we value and recognize that a single person’s vision can power an innovation effort. But in almost every field – and we work with many, from scientists, professors and teachers to marketing types or NGO field workers – it is more often the deliberate mixing of minds and talents that results in a tangible, innovative outcome.

Except group work can be clunky and cumbersome. You have to spend longer clarifying the objectives, aligning resources and getting people on board. Sometimes, it can seem nearly impossible to achieve the consensus necessary to advance within a task. Groups are a powerful mechanism to produce innovative solutions, but getting to that product can be arduous, particularly if it’s not well facilitated. Continue reading »

An article in Knowledge@Wharton highlighted an apparent paradox: organisations want greater creativity, but regard people who demonstrate creative thinking as being less suitable for leadership than their more “normal” colleagues.

The article - why creative people lose out on leadership positions - has generated a lot of discussion. And, it has been strongly argued (see Gerard Puccio’s comment) that it has been stretched beyond its original meaning. However, leaving the hype to one side, the article highlights a fundamental problem that society has with creativity. People cannot agree what we mean by the term. And because of this definitional ambiguity, we end up talking at cross purposes. Continue reading »

While its origins might be more technical, the term networking has stretched into the human realm, and with the advent (and overuse) of the term Social Networking, has raised our sensitivities about its meaning. In its most neutral sense, a network is a collection of connected resources that share and exchange and economize together. If you think about the network of people around you, hopefully it’s a vision of something supportive, a chain of people who sustain and inspire you and connect you to a community.

Networking has some less than positive connotations. Someone who networks too much can be perceived as superficial, a collector of business cards, a name-dropper. Picture the person shaking your hand at a cocktail party, looking over your shoulder to see if there’s anyone more important or more connected that they should be talking to instead of you. That’s a networker, in the most pejorative sense. Continue reading »

We’ve received an increasing number of requests to run a shorter version of the Sandpit innovation event. This is, no doubt, a reaction to the recession and a reflection of the pressures on organisations to deliver greater value with less time and less money.

A five-day Sandpit often produces astonishing results, but what happens if the event is compressed into a shorter period of time? Do breakthroughs happen in the same way, or is there a minimum time required to achieved innovation? In an attempt to answer these questions we’ve designed a new event called a Jumpstart. It is literally that – a jumpstart to enable the right people to come together and start the creative process. If a Sandpit is a marathon, the Jumpstart is a sprint, the 100-metre dash that allows people to get their creative juices flowing, which hopefully results in solutions to challenges or problems. Continue reading »

Too many people think of creativity as something that magically happens: a Eureka experience of discovery and invention, an abstract inspiration of an artist, the genius of a composer or the brilliance of an architect. This kind of thinking – that creativity is a talent bestowed only upon the gifted – spurs self-deprecating comments like, “I’m just not that creative,” which makes us cringe, because our work is built on the premise that anyone can be creative and that it doesn’t always happen by accident.

Every person is, in some way, creative.

This is one of the tenants of Creative Problem Solving (CPS), the foundation of most creative processes and the framework upon which our Sandpit model is designed. Creativity extends beyond the arts, beyond science and invention – it can be expressed in so many different ways: developing a genius marketing plan, inspiring young children, designing a garden, cooking up miracles in the kitchen, engineering a more efficient manufacturing process, managing a team of diverse personalities. When we include problem solving as part of the practice of creativity, an entire universe of possibilities opens up, for anyone and everyone. Continue reading »

Science is a subject available to both genders and yet women, if not directly discouraged, haven’t been encouraged to pursue it as a field of study. Girls are steered toward languages and the liberal arts, implying that maths and sciences are better left to the boys. It’s a stereotype thatís been torn down, and yet the gender imbalance is still apparent in the field of scientific research and academics.

We see it in the make-up of the participant rosters for the Sandpits we run. These events host between 18 and 35 people, depending on the type of question and the funding available. Usually the number of female participants – women who’ve applied to and have been accepted – hovers around 25% of the group. When the question has easily evident social-science impact like the future of the digital economy, the number is higher. But in a typical Sandpit, the ratio of men to women is 3:1. It’s even been as low as 4:1. Continue reading »

What would the world be like with “frictionless” creativity? What if we could easily engage with practically anyone, anywhere, at almost no transactional cost? How would that impact our capacity to connect with and catalyze our creative colleagues all over the world?

Without geographical constraints you could access talent from anyplace around the globe, while staying put in exactly the place where you choose to be. The economic costs of an office could be eliminated, or at least the expenses of meetings and business travel could be minimized. The environment would thank you for reducing your carbon footprint. Yes, you’d have to account for the cost of people’s time, but that could be classified as an investment with a potentially high return, especially if innovation can thrive, despite – or as a result of – the diverse perspectives of a virtual team. Continue reading »