Creative Conspiracy. Leigh Thompson

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       Who needs ground rules? It is a common fallacy to believe that creative teams should throw out all the rules. The right rules and norms actually liberate groups! However, not all rules are conducive for the creative conspiracy. The right brainstorming rules catalyze the creative effort and improve performance. The wrong rules lead to self-censoring behavior and frustration. Another problem is that teams often violate the very rules that they sought to put into place! I call this team drift—the tendency for organizations to slowly revert back to business as usual. This book is about staying on course and sometimes that means going into a headwind. This is why meeting facilitators are key. Chapter 7 provides a review of the original four rules of brainstorming and then supplements these with additional rules.

       Conflict: can’t live with it, can’t live without it. On the one hand, most people don’t like conflict they seek to avoid it, and associate it with dysfunction. But teams that avoid conflict don’t get a lot of creative work done. On the other hand, teams that embrace the wrong kind of conflict—engage in open confrontation, rudeness, or take-no-prisoners battle—have their own problems. Chapter 6 distinguishes two types of conflict in teams: conflict about the task (what should be done) and conflict about the people, often referred to as task conflict versus relationship conflict. The key is to be hard on the problem, not the people. This chapter teaches teams how to have a good fight.

       The who and how of group facilitation. Most team meetings are either facilitated by no one in particular or a leader who may have his or her own agenda. People who may not have group facilitation skills may do more harm than good. That’s a waste of the group’s time. It is important that someone take control of the process and engineer the meeting in a way to suit the goal. Creative teamwork is one type of work that teams do and setting the stage for creativity is anything but intuitive. Chapter 7 reviews the best practices for the creative conspiracy.

       Aids, props, stimulation. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that business meetings should be dull and people should not have fun. These same people decided that an eight-point font and a seventy-five-slide PowerPoint deck is also good for meetings. So most meetings take place with people seated around a table in a room with blank walls. Most people don’t realize how much of their behavior and mood is affected by the environment, for example, by color. Seating behavior influences who emerges as a leader. Teams that have committed to the creative conspiracy carefully design their meeting spaces to invite and capture ideas. In Chapter 7, the challenge is how you would allocate a significant budget to organize the optimal creative retreat.

       Mood. Team leaders are extremely contagious. Mood is a temporary state that is either positive or negative and either high in energy or low in energy. Mood can be affected by a number of factors and mood strongly influences creativity. Chapter 5 discusses mood in detail and describes its role in motivating the creative team.

       Goal setting. Goal setting is hugely important for creative teamwork. Alex Osborn, the father of brainstorming, wisely realized that quality goals can stymie a team; in contrast, quantity goals liberate a team. Chapter 7 discusses the importance of setting stretch goals.

       Diversity. Diversity is like an onion, meaning that on a very superficial level, we might diversify, say, on skin or eye color or dress. On a deeper level, we might diversify on the basis of education and experience. And still deeper, there are differences in values and morals. There’s a lot of evidence that diverse teams are more creative, but also experience more conflict. Chapter 3 takes up the question of diversity and how to build a heterogeneous team.

       Team size. Most team leaders make their teams too big, often by a factor of two or more! Consequently, meetings are often a waste of time, difficult to schedule, and hard to manage. As a general rule of thumb, I like Richard Hackman’s advice: keep the team in single digits. I discuss team size in our chapter 3.

       Incentives and rewards. Incentives and rewards form part of the discussion in chapter 5, on how to motivate the team. Most people regard themselves to be intrinsically motivated but think others are in it simply for the money. This disconnect creates problems when we work with others.

       Leadership. Who should lead the creative team? Chapter 4 considers the characteristics of the ideal leader.

       Brainstorming. Brainstorming is such a common practice that there is scarcely an organization that does not purport to use it. However, most companies cannot articulate the rules of brainstorming, much less follow them. In chapter 7, the four cardinal rules of brainstorming are reviewed, along with the evidence that supports their effectiveness today. The chapter also reviews new research that further improves brainstorming effectiveness. It is imperative to structure the brainstorming session differently than other meetings. Failure to do so will mean that people may remain in the same passive-aggressive mind-set that they take into other meetings. Part of the creative conspiracy is to set the mood so that people are lured into engaging in thoughts and behaviors that, quite frankly, will not be appropriate in other contexts, but that will pave the road toward success in the creative context.

       Team membership. Teams that have masterminded the creative conspiracy are marked by high levels of efficiency and productivity, but there is also a special character to their boundaries and membership. СКАЧАТЬ