Improving the creativity of organizational work group

Team V

施光玉、許怡涓 、何柏青

Why is Creativity so important?

• Flatter organizational structures require companies, divisions, and managers to act in a more entrepreneurial and inventive fashion.

• Businesses are becoming more and more competitive.

• Blurred lines between traditional notions of who is “inside” and who is “outside” the company allow teams to form new relationship with suppliers, complementary businesses and shadow business.

• Customer service is more important than ever.

Know Creativity

• The production of novel and useful ideas

• James Guilford: Creativity thinking occurs when a problem solver invents a novel solution to a problem

Classification of New Ideas

Creative conservative

Realistic

Idealistic

Realistic:connected to current ideas and knowledge Idealistic

Creative: highly original and imaginative Conservative

Creative Realism Conservative Realism

Conservative Idealism

Creative Idealism

Example I

Example II

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Creative Realism

Conservative Realism

Measuring Creativity

• Guilford’s Cardboard-box task

Participant Answer Fluency Flexibility Originality

Alex -a god

-a telephone

-currency

3 3 Unknown

Jenny -a cage

-a container

-a kennel

3 1 Unknown

Fluency: How many different ideas a person is able to generate?

Flexibility: How many different Types ideas a person is able to generate?

Originality: a measure of the uniqueness or originality of the idea

Numbers

Item Range

Fluency 5-40

Flexibility 4-17

Creativity 0-14

Alex Osborn: Quantity often does breed quality

Guilford: Flexibility is the driver among the three items.

Flexibility represents a source of Divergent Thinking

Divergent Thinking represents a source of Creativity

Convergent Thinking vs. Divergent Thinking

• Convergent Thinking- Thinking proceeds toward or converges on a single answer

(A Gambling example)

• Divergent Thinking- Thinking moves outwards from a problem in many directions and involves thinking without Boundaries.

• Janusian Thinking- the ability to cope with conflicting ideas, paradoxes, ambiguity and doubt

How to stimulate Divergent (Junisian)Thinking?

• Tom Verberne’s suggestions • Open-ended questions stimulate divergent thinking. (most negative and most positive) (a hotel example)

• Role Switching

• Ideas that cannot be implemented (Impossibilities)

Why do teams tend to focus on convergent Thinking?

• Act like a norming device

• Diversity also means conflict

• Other reasons:

The Creator of Brainstorming

• Creator: Alex Osborn

• His main ideas:• - The main blocks to the organizational creativity was the premature

evaluation of ideas.

• - Two heads are better than one when it came to generating ideas. (People are trained to defer judgment of their own and others’ ideas during the idea generation)

• - Brainstorming can increase quality and quantity of ideas by group people.

Brainstorming

Table 1Rules for Brainstorming

No Criticism: Do not criticize ideas. Group members should not evaluate ideas in any way

during the generation phase; all ideas should be considered valuable.

Freewheeling Welcome: Group members should express any idea that comes to mind, no matter how

strange, weird, or fanciful. Group members are encourages not to be

constrained more timid. They should freewheel whenever possible.

Quantity Desired: Group members should generate as many ideas as possible. Groups should strive for quantity, as the more ideas, the better. A high quantity of ideas

increases the probability of finding excellent solutions.

Combining/Improving Because all of the ideas belong to the group, members should try to modify and

Ideas Encouraged: extend the ideas suggested by other members whenever possible.

Source: Adapted from A.F. Osborn. 1957. Applied imagination (revised edition). New York: Scribner

Basic Idea:

A team is more likely to discover a REALLY GOOD idea if it has a lot to choose.

But there is even more to brainstorming than mere quantity

Does Brainstorming Work?

Table 2

Face-to-face The same number of people working

brainstorming group independently (solitary brainstorming)

Quantity: The number of ideas generated 28 74.5%

Quality: Percentage of "good ideas" 8.90% 12.7%

(judged anonymously by independent experts)

Source: Adapted from Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. 1987. Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: Toward a solution of a riddle.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53: 497-509.

Performance Data of Group and Solitary Brainstorming

Four Major Problems• Social loafing

• -Organizational members feel their opinions are not so important or necessary, they are likely to loaf.

• “Flow” state- by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (psychology)

• Q: An example of loafing in your office

• Conformity

• -The desire to be liked and accepted by others in one group

• -Fearing group members would negatively evaluate the ideas

• Production Blocking

• -Waiting period is so long that participants forget their ideas.

• Downward Norm Setting

• -The performance of people working within a group tends to converge over time.

• - The least productive members are often more influential in determining overall team performance than the high performers, when there are no internal or external incentives for high performance.

What Goes on During a Typical Brainstorming Session?

Experience inhibitions, anxiety, and self-presentational concerns

Reduce their production

Participate in social rituals, such as telling stories, repeating ideas, and

giving positive feedback (a natural pattern of conversation that works

well at cocktail parties but kills creativity)

Set their performance benchmarks too low

Conform in terms of ideas

Conform in terms of rate of idea generation

Ten Strategies Build Team Creativity

Heterogeneous vs. HomogeneousHeterogeneous Groups , compared with homogeneous groups can:

• - offer different categories of ideas and ways of looking at the problems

• - excel at all measures of creativity

• - create more arguments, apply more strategies, detect more novel solutions, and better at integrating multiple perspectives

• Definition: the act of applying a concept or idea from a particular domain to another domain

• Example: 曹植 vs. 曹丕 ; 錯誤偵測 vs. 迴轉壽司 ; red (green) vs. stop (go)

• Problem: It is not easy to transform relevant information from one domain to another because it is not easy for people to access another domain.

• “Inert Knowledge” Problem: applying the previously learned knowledge to new solutions is difficult.

• Example: a ray destroys tumor vs. a general captures a fortress

Analogical Reasoning

VLED

( 1, 1, 1, … , 1)

( 1, 0, 1, … , 1)SDI SDO SDI SDO SDI SDO SDI SDO

( 1, 0, 1, … , 1)

• Definition:

• Benefits:• - Eliminate the problem of production block

• - Eliminate the conformity problem due to “Anonymous”

• - Consistently produce more and more ideas than typical brainstorming

• Options:• - Take breaks

Brainwriting

Nominal Group Technique• Definition: Nominal Group Technique (NGT)

• One variant: Anonymous Nominal Technique• Benefit: Creating greater acceptance of others’ ideas; preventing

individual members from championing only their own ideas

• Another variant: Delphi technique• Benefit: Providing maximum structure, ensuring equal input,

avoiding production blocking.• Disadvantages: time consuming

Item Character Job Definition

Anonymous NGT any member of the group Collect notecards, shuffle and distribute them

Delphi NGT trusted by group members Distribute a topic or idea to members, collect feedback and repeat the actions till the task is done

Comparing the facilitator between the two variants

Creating an Organizational Memory

• Groups can create an organizational memory by recording ideas

in full view.

• Recording all ideas greatly improves brainstorming sessions.

• Examples:

- Buckman Laboratories Inc,. : Connects all of its associates

worldwide with a proprietary knowledge network, K’Netix.

- Sun Microsystems’ Java Migration Team: Created a

shared-code library

Trained Facilitators

• A trained facilitator:- Better follow the rules of brainstorming which helps to create an

organizational memory, and keep teams on track

- Bring the level of team performance up to that of nominal groups

Long-term Benefit to train facilitator: - Guide teams in several sessions of productive idea generation

- Coach teams to share ideas without extensive social interaction or

“filler” talk.

Example: - IDEO Design Firm : Key qualification of the facilitators is

“good with groups”

- Group leaders are used to facilitate all brainstorming sessions.

High Benchmarks

• Brainstorming groups often underperform due to lack of

benchmarks.

• Provide brainstormers with high performance standards increases

the number of ideas generated greatly.

• A facilitator can periodically call the attention of brainstormers to a

graph on the computer screen.

- It indicates how the team’s performance comparing with other

teams.

- It also enhances the number of ideas generated by the group.

• Brainstorming also helps members to record their own ideas.

Membership Chang Greater Member Diversity

- Groups who experience membership change will generate more and different ideas than those groups who remain unchanged.

• Influence of a new comer - Inspire old members to look at themselves more thoughtfully- Motivate old-timers to revisit their task to develop and improve methods for performing group tasks.

• A better position of the group- The group is in a better position to think about their working style and learn from others as well.

• Transitory nature of interaction- Groups that experience membership change are more task-oriented due to the transitory nature of interaction among members of groups.

• Stepladder technique- A variant of the membership-change technique- Members are added one by one to the team- Members with the best individual decisions exert more influence in stepladder groups than in tree interaction groups.

Electronic Brainstorming EBS (Electronic brainstorming)

- Use of computers to interact and exchange ideas.

An variation of electronic brainstorming used by Mattel Media - A self-proclaimed “technographer” records team members’ new-product ideas

on a laptop.

- If you are writing, you are not thinking.

- Did not allow anyone to write to minimize production blocking

- The note-take recorded everyone’s ideas in front of the group.

- Such ideas could be rated, evaluated, accepted or dumped.

- Everyone left the meeting with a hard copy in hand, providing the organizational

memory.

- Boneyard: A file of ideas which were rejected in the meeting. These notions may be

valuable later for other projects.

Build a Playground

Stimulate creativity in the short terms and instill

long-term passion and motivation of the creation in the

work playground.

Break with old ideas of its meaning at work

Chill-out zones

- Spaces that are designed to foster creativity including

a lot of fun elements.

- A example of Southern California’s Foote, Cone & Belding

Advertising Agency

- A example of D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles Advertising

Agency