By Jackie Mulligan, principal lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, and director of enterprise at the UK Centre for Events Management
I spend a lot of time at meetings. I also spend a lot of time thinking about creativity. Sometimes I do both at the same time! Innovation is the driving force of our economies, and innovation cannot happen without creativity.
Theresa Amabile, a well-published creativity researcher claims that creativity is “the seed of all innovation”. The good news is that my research is showing that meetings play a role in planting that seed.
Often companies say that they attend meetings to gain knowledge and establish contacts. Their delegates’ ability to combine new knowledge and networks can result in innovation. Goran Ekvall describes the capacity for companies to do this and nurture ideas as a company’s creative climate.
There are two sides to meeting outcomes – what happens inside the meeting and the environment outside it.
My focus is on what happens in meetings. My research shows pointers for creativity that feel like common sense, in a way that the best ideas often do. In reality, just like ideas, they can be quite tricky to put into practice and especially so within the constraints of a 1 or 2 day conference. Here’s one pointer.
We might assume that providing a blank canvas would be effective. It was for Van Gogh perhaps – but a blank canvas does little to stimulate business creativity.
For business creativity to thrive, we actually need structure. But not too much or too little. We can determine structure by referring to the creative process.
The creative process (that is the way we generate ideas) includes distinct stages and pretty much all start with ‘Preparation’.
Preparation stage is where meetings come in. Speakers can prompt a new way of considering a service. A task may include approaching pricing in a different way. A team-building activity might make participants re-evaluate leadership. If your meeting includes this kind of content, whatever the desired objective, creativity is likely to be part of the outcome, whether you mention it or not.
Planners who intend to stimulate the creative process should ensure their designs:
1. make participants curious about something or make participants wonder
2. help participants to identify an opportunity or a problem
3. provide participants with the resources (stimuli or simply other people with different perspectives) to help them consider new ideas or approaches
4. ensure people feel safe and comfortable to exchange views and gain positive and informational feedback
5. give people time to focus
You may be saying that most meeting planners do this already. Discussions are essential because they help participants to access different perspectives. But discussions require sufficient time as well as feedback. Facilitation, feedback and prompting help participants feel confident in their own creative inputs and outputs.
Participants need time to focus on finding their own solutions on their own or at most in pairs. The reason is that trust is crucial for ideas to generate. That trust is easier to achieve in pairs rather than in groups where people may feel unable to express themselves. Many people prefer working on their own.
Research shows that the more important someone feels a task is, the more participants focus on the activity.
So, meetings can provide safe spaces to focus on something important, meet different people and break the everyday thinking. In these ways, meetings can fuel creativity.
So, meetings do have the potential to play a vital role in igniting creativity – which in turn means meetings can fuel economies.
With that in mind, planners may want to incorporate ‘Preparation’ into their meeting designs.
After all, if your meeting succeeds in delivering part of the creative process, rest assured that as well as everything else, you have planted the seed of innovation. It is the creative climate outside your meeting that will determine whether it grows.
