Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62203
Harry Vardis of Creative Focus Inc. leads a course on creativity. At Cranfield, the creativity contact, or should they be installed at opposite ends of the hall so that they catch other employees in their nets as they head toward each others' offices? Says Vardis, "Managers need to be aware of the best ways to utilize space and rela- tionships to get people to be team players or more individu- alistic. We go through four different models of architecture and team-building in this session." At Cranfield, the creativity instruction usually begins with teaching participants how to relax enough to access their imaginations. "People need to understand that there's a whole part of the creative process that's outside the rational mind," says Janni. "I think of it as a four-stage process: prepa- ration, incubation, illumination, and translation. The first and last are very proactive stages. But the second and third stages require you to go into a different mode of consciousness. The first stage is a mode of doing; the second is a mode of being. "In a lot of corporate settings, they want you to be creative in the doing mode, so you go straight from preparation to translation and back again," he continues. "But we're teach- ing them that—if you want to get new ideas and new insights—there's a whole other crucial stage where you really have to get into the being part of the process. It involves learning to be receptive and being able to tolerate not know- ing, being out of control. That's very difficult for the corpo- rate mind to understand." According to Janni, to sink into the incubation stage, exec- or even the first hour, what they're going to do in their final presentation, which is their impulse," Pinard says. "They want to decide immediately and then perfect—which is completely antithetical to the notion of discovery and process. If I've been successful, by week four they still don't know what they're going to do for their presentation. In week five, I let them think about the presentation. The result is a very fresh presentation driven by the work they've done rather than their idea of what the work should be." In addition, Pinard says, the Babson staff has decided "I try hard to keep them from deciding in the first week, against employing any complex equipment, like a video camera, that needs some technical expertise. "Such equip- ment gives students a way out of the difficult task ahead of them, which is to be engaged in a process with no clear end," she says. Not only is the creative process filled with ambiguity, it FROM FAD TO VERSE utives need to slow down. "I do quite a lot of work taking people into a stage of deep relaxation, where they become more receptive. They listen much better—to other people and to their own imaginations. They quiet down a bit. That's a prerequisite for entering a more creative state of mind." To get participants to achieve this state, he often has them lying on the floor and practicing deep breathing exercises. Eventually, he says, participants will learn to balance the two states of being even when they're in the working world. Embracing Ambiguity For all these creativity instructors, there is a strong emphasis on what Pinard calls "the messiness of process"—the strange, unfamiliar, and often uncomfortable sense of ambiguity that occurs in the middle of creating something from nothing. Pinard encourages students to embrace this ambiguity. For instance, at the end of their five-week creativity stream, stu- dents must do a presentation to the entire Babson communi- ty based on what they've learned. 36 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2003 Educators who still doubt how creativity classes can influence strategies in the workplace might sit in on one of the sessions Harry Vardis orchestrates through Creative Focus Inc. Students are divided into teams of nine each that are further subdivided into smaller teams. The whole group takes an hour to discuss the best way to build a castle for a queen, with each team taking responsibility for a different section of the castle. After the initial discussion period, they are separated, and they cannot communicate with other teams again, although they can continue discussions within their own teams until they perfect their part of the design. At the end, the teams come together for half an hour to try to align the final pieces of their castle, which they then present to the queen using models made of playing cards and duct tape. To be successful, the completed castle has to live up to the queen's tastes and expectations—that is, she has to happily accept it as it is. Sound ridiculous? Vardis says, "Imagine a corporation where teams work on different products or different parts of the same product, but they never speak to each other. Many times they don't speak to their end consumer, either, yet they go ahead and continue to build products. We don't tell our participants, 'You cannot speak to the queen,' but it doesn't occur to them that they should unless the queen doesn't accept the castle at the end. It's a simple but powerful exer- cise to demonstrate team-building and cross-team communi-