Managing Creativity MBA dissertation

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I recently gave a presentation at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a topic entitled "Is creativity management an oxymoron?"

The essential confusion to people resistant to the idea of "creativity management" was the word "management." Replace it with the word "optimization" and the resistance disappears; all we're really trying to do is optimize the quality of the idea pool and optimize the implementation process.

Then you can suggest that most people already implicitly accept the idea of creativity management: if you ask them to solve a problem or engage in a particular endeavour, one of the things they're likely to do is herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct some sort of brainstorming session and implicit in that action is the acceptance that certain methods, processes and procedures enhance creative output.

Then you can begin discussing how to improve the enormous amount of creative output people generate, from problem solving in everyday business life right up to the level or art.

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TIP OF THE DAY: BEWARE OF GROUP SIZE

When leaders, consultants and managers require ideas, they automatically tend to herd people into a room and conduct a (usually ineffective) brainstorming session. One reason for their ineffectiveness is a failure to consider the impact of group size.

There is a pervasive belief that creativity is enhanced in larger groups. However, significant data indicates that large groups are detrimental to creative output. Some of the arguments against large groups are:

a) The sum of ideas produced by individuals acting alone is greater than the sum of ideas produced by those same individuals when acting as a group.

b) Large groups dilute ideas.

c) Symptoms of group think increase as a group gets larger due to the illusion of invulnerability, unquestioned belief in the group's morality and rationalisation by collective justification of decisions.

d) As group size increases, the percentage of individual performance decreases. A single person is 95% engaged in a task, two people are each 90% engaged and the decline increases until it evens out at about 15 members to around 30%.

e) Groups of three to five elicit much more conformity than just one or two.

f) Large groups increase levels of evaluation apprehension and social loafing.

g) Large groups result in core and peripheral members, restricting information flow.

h) Conflict is inevitable as group size increases, causing sub-group formation and politicking.

i) Large groups create sub-groups with conflicting identitites and goals.

j) Large groups introduce time inefficiencies. 30 individuals can work on 30 problems and produce 150 ideas (30 x 5) in the same time that 1 group working on 1 problem produces 5 ideas (1 x 5).

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If you haven't already done so, you can buy the MBA Research Project on Managing Creativity and Innovation, DIY Audit, Good Idea Generator software and the 50 slide Powerpoint Presentation from http://www.managing-creativity.com

Best

http://www.managing-creativity.com

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