Welcome back. Let's wrap up our module on Group Development and Decision Making, with a focus on creativity and innovation. For the last couple of sessions, we've been looking at decision making. Arguably, the most important function of groups in group communication. And sometimes those group decisions have a different dynamic, a different quality. Some decisions require a degree of novelty and originality to get beyond the status quo and come up with new ideas. Now, much of your group work will involve routine decisions that certainly may be complicated, but they are relatively straightforward. And generally involve applying existing standards and methods to decide among various alternatives. For example, in my job as a professor, I'm consistently involved in different committees that make ongoing decisions about things like budget allocation, hiring a new faculty, and deciding which graduate student applications to accept in our program. These are difficult decisions but usually there's nothing particularly creative or innovative about the process of what we're trying to accomplish. However, there are times when our group work does require novelty and originality. Like when we have to develop new classes to keep our curriculum relevant for today's students, or when we have to come up with a new strategy to manage our budget in response to changes in university policies. I'm sure you can think of similar distinctions in your decision making experiences as well. Situations where decisions are relatively routine and straightforward, however complicated. And situations that need something else from your group. A degree of ingenuity and imagination in order to come up with new ideas and plans and strategies to address the complexities your group is facing. These decision making experiences are different. They require us to think differently and to act differently, in ways that foster creativity and innovation in our decision making. So we can respond effectively to the problems that need to be solved, or the tasks that need to be accomplished. And the key things is that all of this, is directly related to communication. How we interact with each other in our groups. What we say and don't say to each other. And even how we structure the physical environment of our interactions. Despite what is often portrayed in our popular culture. Creativity and innovation are not generic traits that some people simply have or don't have. You might even be tempted to say, well, I'm just not a creative person. Or I'm simply not innovative. I think that's the wrong approach. Creativity and innovation are incredibly social. They emerge when certain people interact with each other in certain ways. Yes, there are certainly a-ha moments when creativity strikes, but this is almost always the outcome of a long process of conversations and connections that results in new ideas and innovative ways to solve problems. So let's look at how we could foster more creativity and innovation in our groups through our communication. That way we can respond more appropriately and more effectively when we recognize where the decision making situation that requires novelty and originality, new ideas to solve the problem or accomplish the task in hand. The first thing we need to focus on in our groups is connectivity. Author Steven Johnson has a great book called Where Good Ideas Come From. And it's all about how so many of the great innovations in our history came from what he calls the collision of small hunches. Breakthrough ideas almost never come in a moment of great insight or sudden stroke of inspiration. Most important ideas take a while to develop and usually several different people have part of the idea, or a part of the solution. They have a hunch and it's only when those small hunches collide that we have a real creative breakthrough, or an innovative solution. So we need to develop social systems that enable hunches to come together, to move from a hunch to a breakthrough. Do you have that in your group? Do you have ways for people to interact with each other that fosters this kind of connectivity? Some of this is informal, outside of what we might consider normal group work. Are people in your group interacting with each other outside of group meetings? Are they interacting with people outside the group itself? And when you do have group meetings, are there interaction barriers that prevent connectivity like norms that prohibit certain kinds of conversations? Who do you need to connect with that might have the missing hunch that you need for a creative breakthrough? How does the physical space of your meeting help or hinder connectivity? You can't always control this, but you should be thinking about how the material environment influences how you interact with each other, even down to the arrangements of chairs or even if you use chairs at all. Overall the main question is, how can you increase or change the connectivity of your group so that you increase the collision of all this small hunches in you group in order to foster the creativity and innovation needed to develop new ideas in your group. Second, we need to appreciate the value of constraints. Now at first look, the idea of constraints may seem antithetical to creative and innovative decision-making. But that's because we have this popular myth in our culture, that creativity is all about a blank slate of endless potential. Their minds need to be free to explore any and all possibilities. And yes, creativity and innovation certainly require a degree of freedom to consider various alternatives. But our minds also need boundaries. We think best when we recognize patterns and associations and make connections. When we are constrained to a certain cognitive landscape. Authors Chip and Dan Heath wrote an interesting article for the magazine and website Fast Company called, Get Back in the Box which challenges the widely held notion that creativity and innovation involve. Getting outside the box, an expression I'm sure you've heard and even use many times. Instead they demonstrate how structure actually enables creativity they give the example of a bank that wants to redesign their front lobby. Imagine you are part of that design team. It would be paralyzing to consider all the various possibilities and combinations of colors, furniture, light fixtures, artwork, etc. But if the leader of the team said, we want the lobby to look more like a coffee shop and less like a post office. You instantly have an idea of what needs to be accomplished and what should be avoided. And the constraint of coffee shop probably actually frees your thinking and brings to mind all sorts of new ideas and possibilities because now you know how to channel your thoughts. See structure enables creativity and innovation. People in creative industries know this very well. Improv actors are taught to be very specific in their prompts to each other. It narrows the possibilities but also makes it easier for people to come up with better responses. Jazz musicians need to know what key to play in. It's a constraint that enables their creativity, even if it limits the possibilities of some aspects of their music. So the key takeaway for your group is to find the right box. When you are in the decision making situation they calls for novelty, originality and new ideas. What structures can you impose that will enable your creativity, that will channel your interaction? So your conversation foster new and better ideas. Finally, we need to consider how or when not to communicate with each other in our groups if we want to be more creative and innovative in our decision making. The most widely implemented technique for creative decision making is brainstorming, the idea that we get together in a group and come up with as many ideas as we can to address the issues at hand. And the one rule of brainstorming, don't criticize. After all, egos are fragile and you won't surface any good ideas if people aren't free to express themselves and explore various possibilities. But the problem with brainstorming is, well, it just doesn't work. Despite its widespread use, decades of research have show that if you put people in a room, and tell them to brainstorm, they'll come up with fewer ideas and less original ideas, than those same people working individually. Instead, we need dissent and debate. Like we discussed in our previous video. Research shows that groups that are encouraged to engage in constructive criticism come up with 24 to 40% more ideas. And those ideas are rated as much more original. The truth is not all ideas are created equally. There are some bad ideas out there. And we shouldn't have to consider them very long just because we're afraid of hurting somebody's feelings. This reminds me of a great scene in the movie The Internship where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's characters take on low level positions working at Google after their sales careers have floundered. In this scene, they're working with a group of younger, tech savvy interns trying to come up with the next big idea for the company, a new mobile app for Smartphones, let's watch. >> Come on guys, let's brainstorm this puppy. >> We're going to put the coffee in the pot and we're going to let it percolate. >> I think it'll be helpful to explore what apps have been most popular in the [CROSSTALK]. >> Go! >> Go backwards to go forward. >> And we could BIN it. >> All out. >> Categorize needle movers by type of user. >> All right, I don't want to kill the momentum or the mojo that you have cooking, but to be fair with you, needles and categories, they don't use apps. People use apps. So I have an idea, nowadays people are taking pictures, right? They have their phones now. They're out, something catches their eye and they want to take it. But then the photo's just sitting there. What if they take that photo and instantaneously put it out there on the line, and they share it with their friends! >> That's Instagram, it already exists. It's one of the most popular apps in the world. Facebook bought them for a billion dollars. >> No, no, mine is very different from that. >> How is your something very different from that? Because on mine you're taking the photo instantaneously you’re putting the photo out there on the line. >> It's online. >> Yeah, I'm putting my photos out on the line and I'm creating an exchange. >> Yeah, that’s Instagram. >> But mine is more of a social sharing on the line that’s happening. >> Online. >> Quick interjection when you keep saying on the line. You do mean online. >> Stewart you don't do that to a man he's got a million dollar idea right here. >> Billion dollar idea. >> Even better let him flow. >> Okay, that all fine but he's talking about something already invented. >> Now, maybe their criticism wasn't the most constructive, versus sarcastic, but I think you get the point. This bad idea needed dissent and debate, not further consideration. Yes, we do need space to consider various alternatives, most of which will not make the final cut. But we can't avoid constructive criticism because of some brainstorming mandate that thou shalt not criticize. Might seem more polite in the moment but it won't foster the creativity and innovation we need in our groups. Similarly, we need to give people space to work individually, apart from the group. Let them work out their hunches, explore different possibilities. Then come back and interact with the group to refine their ideas. Which in turn can inform their next round of individual work. Lead into even better ideas they bring back to the group. And this is not at odds with the idea of connectivity we discussed previously. We don't have to work together for everything. The best ideas usually come from a back and forth process or group work and individual work, refining ideas both individually and in connection with other people which enhances the overall creativity and innovation of our groups. So that concludes module two, and our focus on group development and decision making. We looked at a several important characteristics of group development, including socialization, norms, and roles, as well as different conceptual models that help us understand and explain the development process. And for decision making we learned about the dangerous decision-making traps that groups are susceptible to. As well as communication practices that can improve our decision making and foster creativity and innovation in our groups. Next up in module 3, we'll turn our attention towards the issues of conflict difference and diversity, critical aspects of group communication. For us to understand and appreciate, for our groups to be more successful. I'll see next time.
