News & Updates:

Like the website?
Recommend Us To a Friend

4 • The Operational Creativity Technique - Part 2

There are some obvious drawbacks to the Gordon system, but also some obvious advantages. Mr. Gordon himself feels, and probably rightly, that the only way any company can deter­mine the value of the system to their particular problems is to "plunge in" and experience and experiment with the technique. For this reason, he is somewhat loath to give too many sug­gestions or to reveal his own specific experiences.

One of the prime drawbacks, obviously, is the requirement for a skilled and gifted leader. Any personnel man who has attempted to find or develop a good leader for even ordinary business conferences will immediately recognize that "skilled and gifted" leaders are hard to come by. Furthermore, there are certain other difficulties to be overcome for a good Operational session:

Group members will frequently try to "guess" the real problem in their attempts to get down to more concrete thinking or in their attempts to take over leadership from a leader who must necessarily remain "withdrawn" to a certain extent.

Some group members suffer major inhibitions in this type of meeting, because they feel that purely theoretical discussions are too impractical. This will limit the types of thinking they contribute.

Operational sessions can be extremely fatiguing. The two or three hours mentioned was a minimum—some sessions actually go on for days before the group begins to come near to a solution. This also interjects the question of the time investment —will the group really produce an idea good enough to merit the cost of the continuing session?

And, of course, the statement of the problem, in the form of a key word or phrase is vitally important. It is possible to mislead a panel through selection of the wrong word or key, and thus to completely waste the entire effort.

At the same time, Operational Creativity does offer some highly interesting possibilities for group-technique development: The avoidance of preconceived ideas and ego involvement holds distinct possibilities for improving creative exploration of a problem area. The very broadness of the initial problem state­ment is a spur to complete flexibility in searching out approaches.

For a company willing to invest the time and cost of ex­perimenting with this technique, it would probably be a good one to have "on tap." So far, it has been limited largely to problems of design and of a technical nature. But it would also seem to offer distinct possibilities in many other fields, including management (to develop a new form of organization structure based on fundamental organizational principles, rather than tradition); sales management (to develop a marketing concept completely free of such inhibiting factors as past experience and competitive threats which are often imaginary); and even in the field somewhat preempted by Brainstorming, advertising (for the development of new campaigns to appeal to specific segments of the market). Probably the greatest contribution of the Operational technique is its possibility for synthesis with other group tech­niques to help them overcome some of their major drawbacks.

Just as one example, if it is true that Brainstorming tends to produce superficial results by revealing the problem too soon, it might be possible to strengthen this technique by borrowing from Mr. Gordon and starting out the Brainstorm on a more general subject. Let's take the problem of improving a specific package:

The first problem given to the panel, in the form of their regular briefing memo, might simply be to think about packaging anything. The Brainstorm could then start off by developing a list of "Positive characteristics of good packages." These would be listed on a blackboard. After a few minutes—say ten or fifteen—of this, the actual package under consideration could be revealed, and the problem would become "Specific improve­ments we could make on this package.

Related terms include how to start a small business and small business development center.