Building a Creative Team: Personalities & Thinking Hats
Innovation is a buzzword — no doubt. But as it is with many buzzwords, the word holds great value. Disrupting the market with a great innovation might just help you get ahead of competition within your field. Now you might think: How can I create innovative products, services and ideas? The answer is through a creative process. , Innovation is the outcome of a creative process. And yes — there is a difference.
Innovation: The embodiment, combination and/or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes, or services.
Creativity: A process of developing and expressing novel ideas that are likely to be useful.
Creativity is not just a term used in art or an ability reserved for the great few, like Picasso, Steve Jobs or Michael Jackson. Anyone can be creative. The art of creativity — and not just creativity within the field of art — is very hard to master. It involves extreme opposites: playfulness and professionalism, expertise and beginners’ incompetence, the familiar and the strange… The list goes on.
It is said that two heads are better than one. The same goes for creativity. When a team goes through a creative process, it is easier to encompass all the different opposites creativity demands.
The Diverse Team
“When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.” — Walter Lippmann
Diversity of all kinds are to be encouraged. At the most basic level this can mean a mix people of different ages, genders, origins and backgrounds, but what I want to emphasize is the following two dimensions. First and foremost, a team is most creative if it consists of both friends (or other familiar people) and newcomers. This mix makes people comfortable enough to share their ideas with each other, but the creativity is not stifled, because the group also consists of strangers, who might shake things up.
Secondly, the team must have members who have a deep knowledge within the fields in which they seek to have a creative process. These are the experts. At the same time, the team must also include people with no or little knowledge of the field at all — the beginners. This might seem strange to some readers, but the beginners have great value to the team. Due to ignorance, these team members are able to look at the issue from a new angle. The experts might have some difficulties in escaping their cognitive map (i.e. their patterns of thinking might be stuck) due to working many years within the field.
Think Outside The Box or In It?
Aside from these very “easy to identify” traits (experience level and familiarity), there are some less identifiable traits that should be represented on a team embarking on a creative quest. A creative process involves both divergent and convergent thinking — also known as left brain- and right brain activities. Read more in our blogpost here. Divergent thinking is concerned with seeing things differently and producing novel ideas. Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is concerned with analysing and seeing limits.
In a creative process, one must first generate a large number of ideas without judgement and limits (divergent thinking) and later narrow in on what is most valuable and feasible. As these thinking styles represent opposites, it can be beneficial to identify which thinking style each employee in your company has and chose people who belong to both categories. (1)
This relates to what Ed Catmull wrote in his book Creativity Inc. Here he describes how at SIGGRAPH meetings (2), where ideas are presented people are assigned different roles of ‘idea protectors’ and ‘paper killers’. The ‘idea protectors’ are to only give back critique that is helpful to the new idea and build on the idea, whereas the ‘paper killers’ are to just give critique (no limits set). The point of this is for the ‘idea protectors’ to do something maybe unnatural to some people — embracing novelty. ,This allows for the team to consist of people who are actively thinking in different ways.
As you can see, people can be divided into different categories in various ways. One way is to have your employees take the “Opposing Myers-Briggs type indicators” test. (Or take a free test based on the same idea here). This test assigns one of 16 personalities based on four different scales with two opposing characteristics to each person; extrovert vs introvert, sensing vs intuitive, thinking vs feeling and finally, judging vs perceiving.
Continue reading at www.duuoo.io where the post was originally posted.
