Co-creativity and democracy

Co-creativity is more than getting the ideas and perspectives of disparate players into our idea generation, but includes changing participants in ways which make new ideas possible.

One way to clarify this key aspect of co-creativity is to compare the democracy of the ancient Greeks to the electoral battles of today.

In the original democratic process, not only were a wide range of issues and perspectives welcomed into the discussion, but the decision makers participated in the debate and were open to having their knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shifted by the process. As the debate proceeded, not only were ideas proposed and rejected, but the problem owners changed their expectations of a solution. It was a co-creative learning process.

A great example is the family vacation. Assume that one person gathers all the various ideas, criteria, wishes, expectations of each family member and uses the best analysis and logic to calculate the optimum vacation to make the most people most happy.

Bring the plan to your family and as they each evaluate it in their perspectives, they will hate you for letting them down.

However, if you bring the family together to share and discuss their inputs and ideas, various insights and compromises of expectations emerge. When a final plan emerges, each is prepared to satisfice, to decide to be satisfied.

This is certainly not the case in modern politics in which the goal is to keep reshaping and redescribing the bill or the candidate until just enough disparate people will vote in favor. There is no process of co-creation, of transformation, of becoming a community ready to accept a common solution.

In a co-creative approach to problem solving, it is accepted that no one person understands the problem and there is no one ultimate coherent decision framework. As I often tell my students and clients, if you have a clear understanding of the problem, you do not understand the problem, because the problem is not clear in and of itself.

But as you assemble people who understand bits and pieces of the relevant knowledge, dynamics, and values, and build a cohesive ability to respect and co-create with each other, a new reality can emerge that is ready to be satisfied by a new idea. This is not an easy process.

It is critical to note that it may also be necessary to transform the perspectives of people who were not immersed in the co-creativity to create the context for acceptance and implementation of the ideas developed.

At one of my employers I led a 40 hour study of an organizational issue by about 30 people drawn from all the levels and areas of the company. Interestingly, although all ideas were rejected by senior management when we briefed them, every idea was implemented across the entire company in less than a year. Each participant had moved to a point where the new solutions were obvious, and took action within their authority to make it so. Then they told their peers, who quickly saw the advantages and copied the ideas.

In other words, although the quality of the ideas was great, the greatest impact of the study may well have been the shift in perspective by representative managers, a shift which made the new ideas obvious. With the right participation, not only are the ideas more responsive to the organization's realities, but the organization is more responsive to the ideas.

So as we design deliberate creativity and innovation efforts, it is critical that we include processes which will allow the disparate experts and stakeholders to move their perspectives in ways which not only make new ideas obvious, but make them possible.

Unfortunately, we can only dream of our political process becoming co-creative, and thus truly democratic.

Deliberate Creativity: Idea production or learning?

Being raised almost from birth immersed in the deliberate development of creativity, I learned to constantly focus on getting better ideas and on getting people to accept the ideas.

One of the key tricks was that changing the way we describe and  understand a situation can make better alternatives obvious and possible.  Ironically, I my research forced me to realize that the practice of deliberate creativity can be improved by reconceptualizing it.

When I began to research team creativity, certified professionals in the field of value engineering were kind enough to answer about eighty questions each on three different projects they had done.

As I analyzed the data, I began to see impossibilities. The value engineering process, like the creative problem solving process and many other deliberate creativity approaches is taught as a series of about six steps separating fact finding, problem redefinition, idea generation, idea evaluation and analysis, and preparing proposals to sell the ideas. Most value engineers manage this process in a fixed schedule of steps over a one week, 40 hour, five day sequence with a presentation to management or client on the Friday afternoon.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the best ideas came from teams that spent more time in idea evaluation and proposal writing. If ideas are generated before these steps, how can investing more time in the later steps generate better ideas earlier in the process?

As I examined my own working experience, I noticed something. Many projects had one or more really cool ideas that made a major impact. As I examined them, I realized that many of these ideas had popped into our heads as we were immersed in the tedium of analysis and proposal writing. I informally surveyed my colleagues and found that most of them had similar stories.

Here is my interpretation. The deliberate creative processes tend to be described like a manufacturing process. You get your specifications, you acquire resources (facts and knowledge), produce ideas, inspect for quality, pack and ship. Of course in a manufacturing process, you don't make the product better in inspection or in packaging.

It seems to make more sense to think of the creative process as an individual or team getting smarter and smarter about the problem until a solution is obvious. Even in creative techniques like brainstorming the ideas generated are not as important as the way the process changes the group culture and enables team members to learn about other perspectives on the project. In this view, it makes sense that the team is best prepared to create as it leaves at the end of the presentation.

In response to this model I have made a few changes in my attempts to help teams be more creative. I plan all the creative steps and techniques for the effect on the team's attitudes and knowledge, as well as for output. I take breaks during the documentation phase and throw some impossible problem we have already given up on at the team for a silly creativity exercise to refresh their minds before they get back to writing. The resulting ideas are amazing. And I try to schedule time after the presentations so that if the listeners raise objections, the team can immediately rethink a better solution in the light of the new information provided by the evaluator. Again, this is when the team is at the peak of their powers, and can amaze you.

So, just as we see that some of the best creative ideas are hidden by the way we think about things, the ways we think about improving creativity can also hide great potential.