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Creative Group Techniques

Creative groups are a relatively new concept in business operation. It is true there have been committees, conferences, and various types of small group organizations working on problems ever since there have been problems (the tribal "elders' meeting" for instance). But the idea that you can deliberately put a group of people together and, through planned use of a formal technique, encourage these people to be creative is relatively new—so new, in fact, that we are only beginning to learn how such groups function, and how they can be made to function better. The techniques themselves are still in rather "crude" stages, and we have much to learn about improving them. The important thing to remember is that they do work now—and that an executive who will take the time to learn and understand them can give himself and his company potent tools to use in searching for ideas and problem solutions.

You will recognize from our study of creative individuals that it is not always easy to find one person with all the attributes of a highly creative thinker. However, you will also recognize that at least some of these attributes will be found in varying degrees in most people. Creative group techniques focus the creative characteristics, as well as the educations, experiences, and back­grounds, of a group of people against some problem on which they share, or can acquire, some common knowledge. What you are doing is putting a mental "team" to work on a problem—you give them a set of rules, which all understand and agree upon, in order to coordinate them into a single "master mind." The objec­tive is to accomplish more than an individual mind could alone, or, at least, to accomplish it in less time.

Another reason for the more or less "formal" organization of creative groups is the same as that for putting a definite discipline into your own personal attack on problems: it is a much more efficient way to think. Nearly everyone in business has at some time attended a meeting or conference which was a complete waste of time. This, however, is no reason to condemn the idea of using groups. It is, rather, a condemnation of the individual who allowed a wasteful use of the group tool. There are many reasons why groups fail at their intended tasks. But they are all caused by individuals failing. The group itself is a tool—and it can be used wisely, audaciously, poorly, or disastrously. It de­pends entirely on the skill of the individual who is using the tool.

When you think of groups in terms of tools, then many of the nuts-and-bolts questions about using them become somewhat easier to answer. To repeat an analogy, consider what you go through when you use more tangible types of tools:

When you pick up a hammer, you don't just start hitting things to see what will happen. You wouldn't even take a handsaw off the rack unless you had a specific need for a saw—and then you would pick a specific saw for the particular type of cutting you had to do. By extension, you don't call a creative group together unless you know what it is you expect the group to produce or create. If it happens to be a group aimed at getting ideas, the answers to the questions of how the ideas should be evaluated, and who should do it, should be practically predetermined. And the worst possible way to use a creative group—one that can kill off all interest and any spark among your most creative people— is to turn to it simply because you don't know what else to do. Knowing when and where to use any kind of tool demands an understanding of both the characteristics and the functions of the tool. You can't acquire skill in using a tool just by looking at it, so proper understanding will also require some practice. It will re­quire making mistakes and wasting materials—"materials" such as the time consumed and the disruptions of other activities every time a group is organized. Therefore, please do not consider that the descriptions of group methods and techniques which follow are going to give you everything you need to make productive use of groups right away. (They may, but it will be pure luck!) The rules and methods come first; the understanding and skill will come with experience and analysis of mistakes.

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