Creativity: “Not Required”

I was talking to a large Canadian company about their possible need for facilitation consulting services. The person I was talking to is in HR and has “collaboration” in her portfolio. She suggested that her company would most likely not be in need of my services because the corporate frame of mind was one of “retrenching” and therefore no innovation or creativity would be required.

In my view this is a very narrow and myopic view of how collaboration, visualization and creativity (CVC) can be utilized in companies. CVC does not have to be about brand new product ideas, 10 year plans, hockey stick growth or “out of the box thinking”. A well designed, facilitated workshop with CVC can allow creative thinking to be applied to extremely tactical, operational details.

Case in point: At the beginning of November I worked with the technology group responsible for delivering the infrastructure for the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I’ve blogged about this project before as I’ve worked with them quite a bit over the years. On November 2nd the Olympic Opening Ceremony was 100 days away. On a project of this size, you can be sure that there is not a whole lot of new thinking going into the technology. Almost everything is locked and loaded and yet here we were with a group of 60 people representing 30 different Olympic venues applying the principles of collaborative work so that each group could rapidly identify outstanding issues, determine solutions and get the sign off from leadership in situ, before the end of the day.

The collaborative exercise began weeks earlier when a web-based collaboration tool was used to start a conversation with the 500+ technicians who will be servicing the Games with the following question: “What Issues are Keeping You Up at Night”? In other words, what are the most pressing technical issues 100 days from Opening Ceremonies. Many of the answers were around process and procedure for certain situations. The facilitation team worked in advance to identify themes and trends, categorize like answers and  and to offer insight into how the work should be tackled.

We made sure that the subject matter expertise was in the room during the face to face event and created a process where small teams of experts created solutions to the issues, filled in common templates and permeated the answers throughout the room to make sure that other teams knew what work was being done and, finally, got the requisite approvals from the executive team so that when the day was done, the work was complete. I would suggest that a typical meeting of 60 people in a hotel conference room would not have effectively solved over 40 pressing issues in one day without some process facilitation.

The point is that collaborative process doesn’t have to simply address “innovation” or “blue sky” issues but when done well can effectively accelerate the most detailed, operational, tactical work. Being more effective, more nimble, doing more with less, “retrenching” can always benefit from people’s creative power and a good collaborative process will help unleash that potential.