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.

A number of innovation practitioners responded to her article, here, here and here, and many of the comments that followed her piece were intelligent and thoughtful, continuing the debate for or against creativity in a group setting. When all the dust settles, we think there’s one point that’s most salient: people’s individual preferences.

Some people thrive in a group setting, and their creative flow is sparked by the frenetic and popcorn-style of a fast meeting with lots of ideas, or even if it’s not fast, in an environment where ideas are exchanged and developed by a number of people. Others – probably more introverted – think better when they’re operating solo. They solve problems and get more new ideas by brainstorming alone, preferring to work out solutions on their own, checking in only occasionally with mentors and colleagues when they need a sounding board. There’s still the need for collaboration, but it’s much more informal and unstructured. (What you don’t hear much about are the ambiverts: people who function just fine in groups, but also like to have alone-time.)

The balance of group vs. individual isn’t the only bias to address: Some people have a natural drive to seek disruptive ideas that will break paradigms. Others are more inclined to tweak and improve, and take pleasure in the gentler steps of adaptive creativity. “Breakthrough” thinking gets a lot of hype, but we know that adaptive creativity is equally important to the more revolutionary style of the innovator. Part of our work as facilitators is to identify what kinds of challenges require what kind of approach – and to acknowledge the value of both types of problem solvers.

There are other preferences to consider within the creative process. While some people may excel when it comes to generating ideas, others are stronger at clarifying the problem and getting at root causes. Some people get more energy from taking the seed of an idea and strengthening it. Others do their best work when it comes to implementing. Here’s another bias in our field: towards idea generation. Except we know you can have a hundred great ideas, but if they solve the wrong problem, or if they’re not fully thought-out and implemented well, they don’t amount to much more than a few interesting ideas.

We tell participants at the beginning of our group workshops that suffering is optional: if the activities we propose don’t work for you and you need to go off an have a think on your own, that’s fine. Often we’ll interrupt a series of consecutive group activities and give everyone some time to themselves, to incubate individually and process everything that’s been discussed and let their own ideas emerge, quietly.

Yet we know, from research as well as experience, that it is the collaboration within our programs that leads to innovative results. Collecting a group of people with different perspectives and leaving them to discuss, debate and cross-pollinate has resulted in novel research proposals that even the most introverted of our participants agree could not have been dreamed up without the mixing of minds in the group.

There’s no one right or best way to be innovative. What’s important is to pay attention to our biases and accommodate the differing thinking styles and preferences of our colleagues. It also means we need to encourage people to be aware of what helps their own creative process, whether working in teams or alone, and to take responsibility for it so that everyone gets to do their best thinking, and under the best possible conditions.

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Know Further: Some research on introverts and extroverts and creative performance. The Top Ten myths about introverts. There’s a forum just for introverts. Could you be both extroverted and introverted? And a bit more about the other styles and preferences mentioned above: the Kirton Adaption Innovation Inventory, and Foursight.

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 »

Standard thinking in creativity – and for meetings designed to generate innovative output – is to create a climate where people can feel free to play with concepts, to risk their intellectual vanity and say things that might not make sense but might lead to novel ideas. The objective is to remove any negativity from the immediate environment, encouraging a playful stream-of-consciousness and flow of ideas. Continue reading »

A skilled procrastinator can be highly innovative, inventing all sorts of reasons not to do something, conceiving clever excuses to delay starting or not to have finished. If you have to rely on someone who’s expert at this kind of delaying, it can be maddening. If you’re the procrastinator putting off your own projects, it can be stressful, for you as much for anyone who’s tapping their foot impatiently behind you.

But why do we procrastinate? I’d like to think it’s because we’re not ready. We don’t have enough of something – information, research, ideas, inspiration, stamina – we’re lacking (or so we think) and some part of us feels we cannot start, or continue, until we fill that need. Continue reading »