They filed into the room cautiously, surveying the plastic on the floors and the tables stocked with rainbow-colored rows of acrylic paint tubes, palettes, brushes, and huge blank canvasses. Several people looked back toward the door, longingly, wondering if there was a way that they could escape before the activity started. But a little group dynamic was working in our favor, making it just as embarrassing to leave as it might be to stay.

The participants, a collection of scientists from diverse disciplines and universities, had come together for a Sandpit (a.k.a Ideas Lab) and expected to hear from a few experts, talk with their informed peers, and look for literature on-line to support or condemn ideas that might emerge. They didn’t expect to be holding paint brushes or palette knives and to be thinking about how to mix colors and which brush to use. Some were curious, excited about the prospect. Others were groaning, if not audibly, at least with their facial expressions. Keep 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. Keep reading »

We see it happen in working groups all the time. A new idea gets suggested – whether it’s playfully put out or seriously proposed – and someone in the group, often a senior person with some status or authority, shoots it down. Fairly typical phrases are used to do this: That’ll never work. We’ve tried it before. We’ll never get that approved. It’s just not possible.

But hasn’t just about every major or radical innovation been about doing the very thing that couldn’t be done before? You’ve heard the examples: how Thomas Edison got it wrong 10,000 times before he got the light bulb right. Or how Richard Branson‘s been wrong as much as he’s been right, but that risk-taking is what makes him such a notorious and successful entrepreneur. Keep reading »

A recent Newsweek article sparked an age-old debate between two camps in the innovation field: those for and against brainstorming. The term dates back to 1930s, when Alex Osborn first employed organized ideation in the advertising agency he headed. In his book, Applied Imagination, published in 1953, Osborn defined brainstorming as “a creative conference for producing a list of ideas – ideas which can be subsequently evaluated and further processed.”

Five years later, in 1958, Yale University conducted a study to test brainstorming and concluded that brainstorming individually was more effective than brainstorming in a group, but it was widely misinterpreted as “brainstorming didn’t work.” The Yale study created a debate that has percolated for fifty years. Does brainstorming work or not? Does a group generate more and better ideas than the same people would if they were working individually? Keep reading »