Focusing the Creative Collaboration Process

Creative Collaboration for Team Performance

Creative Collaboration is a process through which a team can generate highly innovative ideas with excellent buy-in from the members of the creative team.

The Process of Team Creativity is as follows:

1. Focus – Focus the team on the task/problem/process, etc…  Take the time to be sure the team is clear on the objectives.
2. Generate Ideas – Brainstorm ideas, categorize them, and define a system for prioritizing their importance
3. Decide – Based on the team’s priorities, select the ‘best.’ ideas and how to implement them.
4. Act – Define the action steps necessary to implement the ideas, and follow through with acting on them.
5. Follow-up and Renewal – Be sure to check in and measure the successes and failures of your action plan, and if necessary, go back to the first step and take a fresh start.

Of all of these steps,  STEP 1 – Focusing, is the key to success.  Without a clear definition of the objective you are trying to accomplish, everything else falls flat.  I was reminded of the validity of this fundamental need for clarity during a recent workshop I attended.

The topic of the workshop wash techniques for facilitating strategic planning retreats, led by a facilitator who provides high-end packages for some of the leading Fortune 100 companies in the US.  She was very knowledgeable, charismatic, and I am certain that she provides an excellent experience for her clients.

As she took us through a mock strategic planning session, I was reminded of the importance of focusing the creative collaboration process.  Our group (all professional facilitators and experts in our own right) was tasked with brainstorming ideas for dealing with the following situation:

“60 minutes before you are to meet your group, the meeting room is flooded with an inch of water.  You can not move to a different location and you have two clients in the group who are wheel chair-bound.  What do you do?”

Here is the process she took us through:

• We spend 5 minutes brainstorming ideas for how to deal with this situation.
• We write our ideas on large colorful post-it notes, coming up with at least 5 reasonable solutions.
• Each team (there were 7 teams of 5) sends one member up to briefly explain their team’s solutions and put them up on the ‘sticky wall.’
• Once we have assembled our 35 solutions, 2 volunteers group similar solutions under general topics, narrowing down the results into 7 categories.

Everything up to now is textbook creative processing, for strategic planning purposes or other team collaboration.  The next step, of course is to prioritize the categories, further narrowing down your results.  Unfortunately, this is what actually happened:

• The facilitator asks us to ‘prioritize the categories in order of most realistic solutions.”
• Individuals in the group discuss how to prioritize the categories, but are unable to agree on a definition for ‘most realistic solutions.’
• With a lack of agreement on what they are trying to achieve, individuals and small groups begin to turn away from the process and bicker amongst themselves.
• Although some individuals share their ideas about the definition of ‘prioritizing,’ no one is reporting the ideas, so they are quickly forgotten, and sometimes repeated.
• The level of frustration in the group rises and the number of people who are ‘checking-out’ grows.
• The facilitator, who has run out of time for this scenario (oops!) moves on to the next topic.

Wow!  What a great example of the need for being clear (focus) when undertaking the creative collaboration process.  If the team, and/or the facilitator had simply taken the time to clearly define the question, and write it down for everyone to see, the creative process could have moved forward.