Deliberate Insight in Team Creativity

Preliminary analysis of data collected from trained expert facilitators of ad hoc creative teams suggests that complex analytical techniques such as costed function modeling and decision criteria matrix may have far more impact upon a team's creative effectiveness than frequently researched measures such as idea quantity. An intriguing relationship in these data between complex creativity and the amount of time spent in evaluating ideas and planning their implementation seems to suggest that a shift in definitional focus from ideas to the insights which reveal those ideas may facilitate both research into team creativity and planning of more effective team problem solving. Increasing the effectiveness of "crossfunctional teams" used by many organizations to increase their effectiveness with complex problems and opportunities is a major concern of many organizations and many individuals. The term "crossfunctional" refers to teams that involve representatives of each of the business "functions," such as marketing, engineering, production, etc. These teams have been around for many years, under labels such as "multi-discipline," "interdisciplinary," "task force," "diagonal-slice teams," "tiger teams," etc. The term is often used to refer to any team that involves the spectrum of perspectives needed to understand a problem completely. While the techniques and concepts that have emerged from the research into individual creativity and invention certainly seem to benefit the performance of these teams, the "world-view" of these approaches to deliberate creativity seems to be a poor fit with some of the dynamics of these efforts. Rhodes (1961) did a nice job of pointing out the various uses of the adjective "creative" as applying to the four P's: person, product, process, and press (or environment). He also clearly delineated between the craftsmanship to produce a creative product (which might be quite mundane) and the idea that made it artistic or creative. New and better seemed to be the theme that everyone used for distinguishing creative ideas and products, but many noticed that there were often differences in the judgment of "new-ness" and "better-ness" between the creator and the rest of the world. Not only that, but different knowledge domains in the world might have quite different perceptions of newness and better-ness. One distinction that is often made is between creativity as the generation of an idea and innovation as the adoption or implementation of an idea. So we have an idea centered model in which a person of some degree of creativity, working in an environment of some degree of creativity, following (consciously or unconsciously) a process of some degree of creativity, generates an idea of some degree of newness and better-ness in their own judgment that is seen as having some degree of newness and better-ness in some Journal of Creative Behavior 2nd qtr 2000 pages 101-117 Deliberate Insight 2 knowledge domains, and which might be adopted and implemented by some person, group, organization, or culture, depending on its "resistance to change." On the basis of this model, various research methods measure the rate of idea production, the diversity of ideas produced, the characteristics of people who generate more and better ideas, the resistance to change of others, and the impact of the ideas. Others try to relate the impact of an idea to the creativity of the idea, and the creativity of the idea to the creativity of the process, environment, or person. Since the work of "cross-functional teams" is to deal with problems which are beyond the capacities of any one individual, which can only be understood and dealt with by an assemblage of people who understand the problem from different perspectives, the resulting dynamics conflict in many ways with the idea focused research paradigm: 1. Since cross-functional teams deal with cross-functional problems, many of their solutions are cross-functional. As a result no one person can fully understand many of the ideas. Therefore, it is difficult to find the "generator" or "inventor" of many of these