Collaborative Innovation
Recently I had a client who had to turn a very interesting corner: they had to double their output on a process that was already working well, but that was very high-touch. Meaning, they have a long term reliable output but it took a lot of input to create that. Now, in order to double the impact they were able to add more team members. But, as we all know, output doesn’t just double because we have more teammates. So, they brought me in to help their team with collaborative innovation, now a mix of team members who know an outdated system that works extremely well, and brand new team members who don’t have the context of the old system.
They were coming together to launch this new project for five days, and brought me in for the first day, to develop a WORKING TOOLKIT for this collaborative innovation process. I designed it using some classic activities, all of which you’ll find on Toolsi (this is not a, invisible box, I wonder, I am a tree and answering unanswerable questions). After a warm, fun opening I described to them the plan for the day: Play, Debrief, Plan, where after each tool we would plan together how they could use that tool for the next four days of that retreat and beyond. It wasn’t that they had to only play the game again and again (though we did think of quicker ways to play so they could sprinkle the games easily into their plan) but also that they could PRACTICE the skills in the work context itself.
The idea is this: playing a game that exhibits a creative skill once may help you to recognize that skill, but playing them over and over builds a foundation to develop the skill itself. For example, this is not a… is a perfect example of an imaginal pivot (i.e, a child who calls a broom a horse). It’s a very powerful developmental skill… but it also is essential for adult creativity: to be able to see things as they are not, as they could be (I learned this while reading Lev Vygotsky in my studies in Imaginative Education at Simon Fraser University). So, playing the game once lets you talk about the imaginal pivot. Playing it many times builds a foundational skill for seeing things other than they are. BUT building on that foundation intentionally in a working environment means noticing, naming and improving the skill in a real-life environment. Here’s an example: A team is stuck on a clunky onboarding flow that no one likes but everyone defends. Someone says, “this is not an onboarding flow, this is a first date,” and suddenly the whole team is talking about pacing, nerves, and what makes someone want a second date. See how the skill gets embedded?
Their feedback was great. Building creative skills in groups takes a lot of nuanced shifting of the group field, because not only are people often debilitated with creative wounds, but their habits of working together (and of what constitutes “work” in general) are often quite deeply ingrained. But with lots of humour, lots of theoretical back up, a very carefully titrated series of activities and stories, and especially thorough debriefing and an explicit plan for how to use this going forward, we were able to create the foundational conditions to make the impossible possible.