Designing creative procedures for work groups

One of my favorite professional practices is designing social processes that help groups creatively explore and solve important challenges (e.g., to come up with a powerful consumer insight, an idea-driven media strategy, etc.). Often I am called in by a company to custom design and implement a series of these activities at a "brainstorming" workshop or offsite focusing on a specific and important topic or challenge: I lead a group through a creative process at a special meeting. The next level of this work is to get these groups to embrace and implement these processes themselves--making them a natural part of their organizational procedures and work life. The materials illustrated below are an example of this second level of work.

The first document below--a PowerPoint presentation--describes the steps and options in a media agency process for 1. combining the information and insights produced by consumer, brand, and marketplace intelligence and 2. creatively working with this information to develop the idea that will help drive and shape how media (from TV ads to the internet to text messages, special events and sponsorships) will be used to bring the "advertising message" to the public. The first document identifies a number of special activities that can be used to creatively guide a group or task force through this process. Instructions for leading each of these activities are presented in the seven other documents illustrated below. These documents are "how to's" the media agency planners can follow to implement different sophisticated brainstorming activities that will help them get to a great idea.

Initiative Media will be distributing these materials throughout their global network. Their media planners will implement these activities as part of their leadership of the media strategy development process. If I have done my work well these activities will be easy to implement, flexible and adaptable, efficient and--most important--provide a substantial boost in the power and creativity of the media ideas that Initiative will now be bringing to their clients.

I really enjoy designing creative social processes--perfect work for a social psychologist whose life revolves around creativity. This sort of "social design work" requires an understanding of group processes (e.g., what groups are good and bad at) combined with an understanding of human creativity (e.g., the creative dance of the left brain and right brain).