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When to Use Creative Groups - Part 3

One of the important points to remember in using a creative group is that the objective is to help you get ideas that will help solve problems. Not ideas just for the sake of having a list of ideas, but ideas to solve the problems you or your company consider worth solving.

Secondly, anything we can do to get those needed ideas is "fair play." In this sense, a creative group in no way competes with or replaces the individual. In fact, a creative individual becomes even more important. He becomes the "problem planner" or "coordinator" who uses his imagination and knowledge of the various problem-solving tools, both individual and group, to quickly and efficiently plot and execute the approach to the prob­lem solution. This type of individual will regard the group as a tool to be used where that particular tool will do the best job. When you consider a creative group of any type as a tool, it then becomes apparent that you will have to learn a few things about it and develop some skill in using it before you can expect maximum results. And you have to learn enough about each type of creative group to know when it is the best tool for the job in hand. An analogy could be made with a hammer. If you were going to build a house by yourself, and someone said to you, "Well, then, you'll want a good hammer," you wouldn't interpret that to mean that a hammer is the only tool you would need, or that a hammer should be used on every job in constructing the house. But you would realize that a hammer would be a very useful tool to have in your kit when you started construction on your house. The same holds true for any of the creative group techniques: none of them is the "universal" tool which will solve any or all problems or even aid you on every problem. But it is well worthwhile to have them in your mental tool kit for the times when they can do a job more efficiently than an "individual" tool. The really creative person in business today is one who is willing to use any tool he can to obtain solutions to problems. To this kind of individual, other minds are tools. And the way to begin a study of creative groups is by studying groups in general. Let's say that a business organization, or a department of an organization, is made up of 100 individual people. These people all have different temperaments and different racial, religious, and family backgrounds. Each of them is a product of his particular heredity, early home environment, and parental training. Each can, therefore, be expected to react somewhat differently to other people, to business situations, and to any experiences with which he is confronted. Their emotional reactions to any stimulus will be quite individual and completely automatic. Their mental reactions, in the form of associations and thought processes, will also be automatic and individual. There will exist differences of opinion on almost any problem and differences in reactions to almost any type of challenge. All these individual differences in backgrounds, education, experience, and emotional responses, then, constitute an available "pool" of mental resources to draw on in a search for a problem solution.

(This, incidentally, is where the understanding group user differs from those critics who complain of "group-think" tactics: the usual sense of "group think" implies that all members of an organization think alike—will have the same responses in the same situation. To a creative group user, such people are useless—what he needs, and, in fact, must have, are the differences in thinking!)

In selecting people from this pool, the creative group user will draw them on the basis of the contributions he expects them to make from their own individual backgrounds, and he will work to focus these varied characteristics on a solution to the problem. He is after a cross-fertilization, rather than an inbreeding, of ideas. There are times when the group organizer will want a flint-like mind on his problem. He may also, in order to ensure some sparks, include a more "steel like" mind. There will be times when the heavy, ponderous, serious thinker is the person needed for a particular problem. But it may be, in order to keep the group from being overwhelmed by such a mind, that one or two frivo­lous, lighthearted types will be needed for balance. It may be that the nature of the problem will be such that you will want to cross organizational or functional lines in making up the group. Re­search scientists and the sales department, for instance, are usually pretty well isolated from each other in a company. But if your problem involved the planning of a new product, you might get some very interesting results from mixing representatives of the two interests.

Such planned, intentional, and intelligent mixing and inter­mixing of personalities and interests is a key to successful group usage on creative-type problems. Each member of the group should be individually selected on the basis of a specific contribu­tion you expect him to make. If you are so fortunate as to be able to select specific contributors who are also highly creative indi­viduals, then you will find yourself handling what can be an extremely "hot" tool, and how well or how poorly you handle it will determine the degree of success that the group can achieve. Now let's see what happens, in a general sense, when you organize a business group to attack a problem creatively.

Related terms include types of small businesses and business organizations.