Creative Conspiracy. Leigh Thompson

like conflict they seek to avoid it, and associate it with dysfunction. But teams that avoid conflict don’t get a lot of creative work done. On the other hand, teams that embrace the wrong kind of conflict—engage in open confrontation, rudeness, or take-no-prisoners battle—have their own problems. Chapter 6 distinguishes two types of conflict in teams: conflict about the task (what should be done) and conflict about the people, often referred to as task conflict versus relationship conflict. The key is to be hard on the problem, not the people. This chapter teaches teams how to have a good fight.

       The who and how of group facilitation. Most team meetings are either facilitated by no one in particular or a leader who may have his or her own agenda. People who may not have group facilitation skills may do more harm than good. That’s a waste of the group’s time. It is important that someone take control of the process and engineer the meeting in a way to suit the goal. Creative teamwork is one type of work that teams do and setting the stage for creativity is anything but intuitive. Chapter 7 reviews the best practices for the creative conspiracy.

       Aids, props, stimulation. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that business meetings should be dull and people should not have fun. These same people decided that an eight-point font and a seventy-five-slide PowerPoint deck is also good for meetings. So most meetings take place with people seated around a table in a room with blank walls. Most people don’t realize how much of their behavior and mood is affected by the environment, for example, by color. Seating behavior influences who emerges as a leader. Teams that have committed to the creative conspiracy carefully design their meeting spaces to invite and capture ideas. In Chapter 7, the challenge is how you would allocate a significant budget to organize the optimal creative retreat.

       Mood. Team leaders are extremely contagious. Mood is a temporary state that is either positive or negative and either high in energy or low in energy. Mood can be affected by a number of factors and mood strongly influences creativity. Chapter 5 discusses mood in detail and describes its role in motivating the creative team.

       Goal setting. Goal setting is hugely important for creative teamwork. Alex Osborn, the father of brainstorming, wisely realized that quality goals can stymie a team; in contrast, quantity goals liberate a team. Chapter 7 discusses the importance of setting stretch goals.

       Diversity. Diversity is like an onion, meaning that on a very superficial level, we might diversify, say, on skin or eye color or dress. On a deeper level, we might diversify on the basis of education and experience. And still deeper, there are differences in values and morals. There’s a lot of evidence that diverse teams are more creative, but also experience more conflict. Chapter 3 takes up the question of diversity and how to build a heterogeneous team.

       Team size. Most team leaders make their teams too big, often by a factor of two or more! Consequently, meetings are often a waste of time, difficult to schedule, and hard to manage. As a general rule of thumb, I like Richard Hackman’s advice: keep the team in single digits. I discuss team size in our chapter 3.

       Incentives and rewards. Incentives and rewards form part of the discussion in chapter 5, on how to motivate the team. Most people regard themselves to be intrinsically motivated but think others are in it simply for the money. This disconnect creates problems when we work with others.

       Leadership. Who should lead the creative team? Chapter 4 considers the characteristics of the ideal leader.

       Brainstorming. Brainstorming is such a common practice that there is scarcely an organization that does not purport to use it. However, most companies cannot articulate the rules of brainstorming, much less follow them. In chapter 7, the four cardinal rules of brainstorming are reviewed, along with the evidence that supports their effectiveness today. The chapter also reviews new research that further improves brainstorming effectiveness. It is imperative to structure the brainstorming session differently than other meetings. Failure to do so will mean that people may remain in the same passive-aggressive mind-set that they take into other meetings. Part of the creative conspiracy is to set the mood so that people are lured into engaging in thoughts and behaviors that, quite frankly, will not be appropriate in other contexts, but that will pave the road toward success in the creative context.

       Team membership. Teams that have masterminded the creative conspiracy are marked by high levels of efficiency and productivity, but there is also a special character to their boundaries and membership. They’re very, very aware who’s part of the team and who’s not. They often have their own mystique—special names, inside jokes, and phrases that are usually not transparent to outsiders. However, nothing is forever and therefore, there is membership change in the creative team. The arrival of new members and departure of founder members instigates a self-reflective process in the team. Said simply, when people come and people go, that leads people to think about what the team is about. In chapter 7 I review some of my own research findings on the benefits of rotating team membership.

       Where does the work get done? The open floor plan was supposed to be a sign that we were team players and we could benefit more by socialization than by holing ourselves up. The open floor plan soon moved from the office space to the educational space. However, it just may not be the best thing for creativity. Groups who have crafted a creative conspiracy have private hideaways, and doors may be shut allowing individuals on the team to do what they need to do. Chapter 2 makes an argument for some degree of what might be viewed anti-social behavior in teams and chapter 7 focuses on the importance of hybrid meeting structures that balance team-time and alone-time.

       Time pressure. Is supposed to be bad, right? Lots of research suggests that groups simply work to fill their time. And whether teams meet for 1 hour, 90 minutes or 2 hours, there are no appreciable differences in group performance. Groups in the creative conspiracy meet without being bound by the meeting start and stop time. Chapter 7 presents evidence that as time pressure increases and the clock starts, creativity increases.

       Social networks. One interesting thing about creative conspiracies is that they often involve far-flung others. Thus, creative groups may very well not be pods of tightly knit friends; in fact, they may have little or no history of a working relationship. They are likely to be characterized as people who have disparate connections—clandestine ties to others who can help them. Chapter 3 focuses on how to compose the creative team and argues that odd bedfellows—as opposed to similarly minded buddies—make for the best creative teams.

      

Chapter Capstone

      There are a lot of popular ideas on how to ignite creativity in teams. This chapter identified several plausible-sounding ideas that have gained popularity as best practices in organizational teams. These beliefs are so commonplace that they have achieved pseudo-scientific status. However, there is very little (or in some cases, absolutely no) scientific evidence to suggest that they work. In fact, some of these myths may even thwart creativity. The good news is that there are straightforward ways to fix most of the pernicious “best practices” that have crept into our organizations.

      I hope this chapter has shaken the very foundations of how you think about creativity in your team. I’ve done my job if you are feeling somewhat rattled. Remember that complacency is the nemesis of the creative conspiracy. This chapter has challenged you to take a hard, critical look at the day-to-day practices of your creative team. If your score on the Creative Collaboration Assessment is low or lower than you desire, don’t despair. There are several steps you can take to dramatically improve the creativity of your team. After all, that’s the point of this book—to speak to the questions that the Creative Collaboration Assessment has raised and introduce the skills needed to spark a creative conspiracy. The next chapters introduce several best practices that are quite different than business as usual.