W O R K . I N . T E A M S
Christopher Vice
Learning to Work in Teams
Design Management Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, Summer 2007
>>> download full document
L E A R N I N G . T O . W O R K . I N . T E A M S
The concept of design as interdisciplinary collaboration is an easy sell. Putting it into practice is another matter. A diverse group of people can simultaneously work on the same problem, but that can be quite different from working together. In a university setting, Christopher Vice shares the tactics and strategies he finds stimulate creative options and nurture the cooperative development and implementation of outcomes.
Published here in an alternate version
Reconfiguring HOW
Among the most challenging aspects of being an educator today is adapting to the continuous change occurring all around us. People in businesses, governments, and institutions of all sorts are wading knee-deep through the sea change brought in by the deluge of data and connectivity of our hyper information culture, the acceleration of revolutions in advanced scientific and technological innovations, and the rise of global interdependence with greater incidence of cross-cultural encounters. Journalists like Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, or design writers like John Thackara, author of In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, hold up a mirror to reflect contemporary realities, helping us to see change as it is happening.
Many, too, have documented the fundamental shift in the way that business processes are managed, having moved from linear hierarchical progression to collaborative parallel processing. Fewer professionals wait for a project to roll into their department assembly worker-style so that they can add their layer of functional expertise. It is less common and less acceptable for R&D specialists to “create something in the lab and then throw it over the wall to the marketing guys and say, 'OK, now go sell it…’”
Yet, today many design education programs still embrace curricula that isolate designing from contextual issues and emphasize the development of idiosyncratic creative perspectives.
Rethinking traditional design curricula
In light of the realities of a continuously reconfiguring world, my colleagues at Indiana University Herron School of Art and Design and I recognized that traditional studio approaches to design education might limit students’ abilities to be successful designers in any roles other than production designers. Additionally, we recognized that a more relevant design education could better equip students for their personal lives as citizens in a world that is becoming increasingly complex, a world that will likely remain in a constant state of change for the foreseeable future. I suppose we could have ignored what we saw happening all around us and continued on what was at that time the present course but we thought we could do better for our students and so we struck out in a somewhat idealistic way on a journey of rethinking and redevelopment. It has not always been smooth sailing but we have learned a lot and I think made great progress towards our goal.
How might Herron become a leading school of new design leadership?
In doing our initial fact-finding we noted an increasing need for young graduates to work in teams but a significant degree of misunderstanding and even resistance to such a concept among students. When reading comments posted on web blogs and online discussion boards like core77.com and underconsideration.com/speakup/ it was clear that many design students regard potential collaborators, clients and even audiences as enemy challengers and harbingers of compromise. Early on we became determined to find better ways.
WHAT WE DID
In a series of curriculum revisions, faculty members redirected the focus of learning to emphasize collaborative creative process knowledge and the requisite process skills to perform real world team-based creative problem solving in complex, fuzzy situations.
At Herron today students, progressively encounter more challenging problems as they develop higher-level skills through experiential learning. Initially design students focus on gaining foundational technical skills. In their second year, design students work independently to develop solutions to real world design briefs that require an intensive engagement with audiences and contexts. Students describe and respond to the audiences and contexts that solutions must address, including recognition of physical, cognitive, cultural, and social human factors, as well as, the technological and economic drivers that shape design decisions.
In their third year, design students begin to collaborate with students in their own design field in partnership with external clients to develop solutions to problems that have not been fully framed. Students focus on identifying unarticulated opportunities for innovation and reframing the understanding of a given situation so that it responds to the needs of all the stakeholders.
Ultimately, in their fourth year, design students participate in collaborations that include students from multiple disciplines in the university. So far teams have been composed of students of design, anthropology, public affairs, public history, bio ethics and informatics. Working in integrated teams, students have conducted people-centered research, provided strategic consultations and developed design solutions. One team partnered with Marion County Circuit and Superior Court (Indianapolis) to improve public participation in and the experience of jury service. Another group worked two years to develop an exhibition titled Fit to Breed? The History and Legacy of Indiana Eugenics, 1907~2007 that examined the relevance of the history of surgical sterilization and other eugenic measures to contemporary issues in human genetics, public health, reproductive health, mental health, and the law.
This approach at the undergraduate level provided Herron’s faculty members with experiences that informed the development of a second proposal for a new graduate design program that takes a cross-disciplinary approach to design thinking and design leadership. Faculty members in the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the Purdue University School of Engineering and Technology participated in planning course work for the new graduate program at Herron. The curriculum is structured so that when fully implemented there will be three tiers of cross-functional, cross-disciplinary learning. For example, an MBA student might take two team-based design courses to earn credit in an “Enterprise Experience in Design Thinking.” By taking several more courses in design, an MBA student could earn a “Graduate Certificate in Design Thinking.” Alternatively, an MBA student might add an additional year of graduate design study to pursue a second joint master’s degree in Design Methods.
Encountering problems with group work
While the new undergraduate curriculum embraced an incremental approach to prepare students to tackle increasingly complex problem types and problem contexts, the curriculum did not adequately prepare students for working with others. Team members required long periods of time to form working relationships and ultimately lacked trusting bonds when faced with challenging situations. Students communicated to professors that the experience was like learning to swim by being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool.
Without the benefit of team process knowledge or team skills, students unwittingly created what J. Richard Hackman, author of Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, calls co-acting groups. Hackman writes, “It is easy to tell who is in a co-acting group because members usually work in proximity to one another… But each member has an individual job to do, and that job’s completion does not depend on what the others do.” Lacking shared understanding and values for working in collaborative groups, students established a “divide and conquer” approach to responsibilities. This way they could each engage their own individualistic personal processes and rely on their own intuition and experience. If project goals were not realized, team members could blame others for not completing their “to do” lists. Alternatively, Hackman regards true teams as, “groups whose task requires them to work together to produce something—a product, service, or decision for which members are collectively accountable and whose acceptability is potentially assessable.”
As a result of the difficulties that students faced in the first iterations of the new collaborative design courses, faculty members decided to emphasize and integrate core values for developing a shared understanding of creative problem solving when working in cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams. Everyone realized that the design curriculum needed to incorporate team process knowledge and team skills development with a goal of building students’ capacity to do shared work. The faculty accepted that by adding team related content they were expanding the scope of their teaching responsibilities. To be successful, the professors had to learn more about teamwork. Based on feedback from students, it was clear that students needed a conceptual framework for understanding the various work styles and problem solving preferences of others. Students expressed that they did not understand why “some people just want to talk all the time,” or why others wanted to “rush to making things without first figuring out what was needed.”
HOW WE DID IT
Embracing systems level perspectives
In our research to identify new methods to improve group processes, Herron faculty members repeatedly encountered ‘synchronizing’ and ‘unifying’ as themes. In the book Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World, Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro invoke systems level thinking as unifying strategy. “Learn to fix the system, not just the symptom,” they write. “To succeed as a leader (or, for that matter, as an individual), you need to unify: your purpose, your strategy, your people and the way they interact, your structure and process, your metrics and rewards, your culture.”
At another early point in their search to become better at teaching team work skills, the Herron faculty members attended a presentation delivered by Harry Boyte, founder and co-Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Boyte articulated the core theory and practice of “everyday politics” through which citizens can “master essential political skills, such as understanding issues in public terms, mapping complex issues of institutional power to create alliances, raising funds, communicating, and negotiating across lines of difference.” In giving examples of the application of everyday politics in real life, Boyte described citizens engaged in processes of collaborative creative problem solving. Boyte’s most powerful examples of the principles of everyday politics in action were the outcomes of Public Achievement, a program dedicated to teaching children from elementary school to high school to use everyday political skills to work collectively in local communities to effect change. Through Public Achievement, young people have worked on a range of issues from creating playgrounds in communities that lacked facilities to establishing a productive dialogue where none previously existed between community members and officers in a local police precinct.
While Boyte frames process skills as the skills of everyday politics, Dr. Mary Kirlin, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Sacramento conducts research on what she calls “civic skills.” In her published literature review, CIRCLE Working Paper 06: The Role of Civic Skills in Fostering Civic Engagement, Kirlin outlines “a typology of civic skills made up of the four dominant skill categories that emerged in the research: organization, communication, collective decision-making, and critical thinking.” In identifying overlapping sets of process skills that are essential for making group work productive, both Boyte and Kirlin help establish our understanding of what students need to learn.
By thinking about how processes and process skills for cross-functional, cross-disciplinary design teams connected to both everyday political skills and civic skills for creative problem solving in communities, the Herron team tapped into new systems level perspectives for thinking about the conditions necessary for designing with integrated teams.
Discovering NextD
Early in the effort to incorporate team process knowledge and team skills into the curriculum, Herron faculty members discovered NextDesign Leadership Institute in New York. Launched in 2002 by GK VanPatter and Elizabeth Pastor, NextD was conceived as an experiment in innovation acceleration for the design education community and “to help raise awareness regarding how the challenges of cross-disciplinary innovation leadership have radically changed at the leading edge of the marketplace and how those changes are impacting designers.” Prior to launching NextDesign Leadership Institute, VanPatter and Pastor were co-founders of Scient's Innovation Acceleration Lab. They were both educated as designers. In the summer of 2005 members of the Herron faculty, including myself, attended a NextD summer workshop and there we saw others far ahead in what they refer to as the rerethinking of design. At NextD they talk about framed and unframed challenges, cross-disciplinary behaviors and skills. Coming from sense-making backgrounds VanPatter and Pastor had already developed many explanatory visual models regarding how the nature of work for designers and others is changing and why. They described what innovation looks like from an inclusive human-centered perspective. In a one-day experiential learning workshop I was not only inspired but I saw a lot of things being taught that we wanted to be teaching at Herron. NextD was the closest model that I had seen so far to what we at Herron idealistically had in mind. VanPatter and Pastor speak and model the language of adaptable innovation and show practical examples from their own practice. They talk of teaching designers the language underneath all design processes that will allow designers to work more effectively in what they call the “strategic space”. In that space designers have the ability to help with framing all kinds of challenges, not just graphic, product or service related challenges.
The Focus of NextD is on significantly building HOW skills as opposed to WHAT skills. In the NextD world they talk about HOW skills having a much longer shelf life then WHAT skills. They talked about Charles Eames and the famous question; What are the boundaries of design? They were not afraid of history! As an educator it was a line of thinking that resonated with me. The NextD workshop provides only a partial but very useful view into the many tools, frameworks and models that VanPatter and Pastor use in their own innovation consulting business, Humantific. For us discovering NextDesign Leadership Institute was an important building block in our curriculum redevelopment. We emerged from the NextD experience charged up and confident that we were on the right track. Being faced with updating a visual communications program what I saw VanPatter and Pastor doing was particularly meaningful to me. More then anything else it helped me understand what was possible if you keep an open mind to others within the field of design and beyond.
Their work is deeply influenced by the sense-making focus of Richard Saul Wurman and the advanced strategic problem solving theories developed by Dr. Min Basadur, founder of the Basadur Center for Applied Creativity Research and author of The Power of Innovation. Dr, Basadur taught innovation to MBA students at the McMaster University for many years. Basadur Group and NextD are long time collaborators. In essence VanPatter and Pastor have created a hybrid toolbox combining visual sense-making and advanced strategic problem solving. NextD has become a good friend of Herron. Our students read all materials on the NextD site so even though we are geographically distant from each other we feel like they are part of our Herron family.
Discovering Basadur Applied Creativity
Through NextD I learned that Basadur pioneered a proprietary “method of applied creativity that interconnects a process of creative problem solving with skills and tools to make that process work.” The method, called the Simplex System, builds applied creativity skills in individuals, teams, and organizations.
The Simplex System provides solutions to the many problems that can occur during teamwork. By establishing clear delineations between content (disciplinary knowledge and expertise that constitute what your are doing) and process (the steps for how you are doing it), the Simplex System eliminates the confusion that can erupt when team members substitute content for process. By representing the steps in the process visually, the Simplex System provides team members with a roadmap that they can follow together. By identifying process skills that are essential for following the process (including valuing, creating and constructively evaluating different points of view), the Simplex System prepares team members for the orchestration of collaborative creative problem solving.
Emphasizing the importance of preparing people to work in teams, Basadur states, “Teams cannot just be thrown together. To work effectively they need group skills training before they begin. There may be a learning curve in the beginning but the process is designed to be simple and the impact of mastering such skills is significant. We have an equation that we use to underline the need for both process and process skills:
INNOVATIVE RESULTS =
CONTENT (What) + PROCESS (How) +PROCESS SKILLS (How Skills).”
Identifying personal preferences in creative problem solving
By recognizing that process skills are intimately connected to interpersonal communication skills, the system acknowledges all the human traits and characteristics that team members bring to collaborative situations. By promoting shared understanding of how and why people respond differently to problem solving processes, the system seeks to disarm the agendas and conflicts that can arise when people interact.
The battles of wills and communication conflicts that occurred when the Herron students first encountered group work demonstrated that new tools were needed to bring people together. Initially the faculty members explored the idea of utilizing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) Assessment as an instrument to help students understand how and why they work and interact with others in particular ways. However, within Basadur’s Simplex System they discovered a more useful tool that is explicitly framed around the issues of creative problem solving. The Basadur Creative Problem Solving Profile is a tool for revealing one’s “own creative style and respecting those of others.”
When each team member completes the Basadur Creative Problem Solving Profile by responding to a series of questions, they discover their own unique blend of four creative problem solving preferences: Generating, Conceptualizing, Optimizing, Implementing.
Basadur describes how each of these four preferences can be connected to construct a circular diagram that represents a model for creative problem solving. “The creative process cycles through four stages. Generation (of new problems and opportunities) flows into Conceptualization (defining and understanding the challenges and creating new, potentially useful ideas), which flows into Optimization (of practical solutions), which flows into Implementation (of the new solutions). Each stage requires different kinds of thinking skills.”
The profile of every person is a composite of all four preferences. Typically, one or two preferences emerge with stronger significance, though one’s profile could show a balanced embrace of all four creative problem solving preferences. Based upon which preferences are expressed the strongest, one might choose to express their profile as one of four roles within a team: Generators, Conceptualizers, Optimizers, and Implementers.
Generators create “options in the form of new possibilities or new problems that might be solved and new opportunities that might be capitalized on.”
Conceptualizers create “options in the form of alternate ways to understand and define a problem or opportunity, and good ideas that help solve it.”
Optimizers create “options in the form of ways to get an idea to work in practice and uncovering all of the factors that go into a successful implementation plan.”
Implementers create “options in the form of actions that get results and gain acceptance for implementing a change or a new idea.”
Hybrid roles are common. An individual might say, “I’m a generator / conceptualizer,” or “I’m an optimizer / implementer.”
When Herron faculty members introduce the profile tool to students, they ensure that students do not try to construct the perception of some preferences as more important or more creative than others. Basadur clearly communicates that each of the four preferences reflects modes of applied creativity. “Everyone one of us is creative, no matter what job we are doing,” writes Basadur. “We simply demonstrate our creativity in different ways. The challenge is making sure that we can express our creativity by fostering a work environment where new ideas are welcomed, where trying something different is encouraged, and where making mistakes is recognized as an important part of learning.”
Immediately after being introduced to the Simplex method and tools, students at Herron communicated a positive response. Students were asked to document their learning through active critical reflection. One student reported, “I learned that using the process skills of ‘diverging,’ ‘converging,’ and ‘deferring judgment’ really helps me look at my team members differently and therefore makes me a better group member. In my previous group, I approached ideas as ‘the devil’s advocate,’ but now I really listen to each person’s ideas which really helps in building a good rapport within the team.”
The elegance of the Simplex Applied Creativity System is that it aligns each individual’s problem solving profile with a problem solving process that requires all of the action logics. Students are readily able to establish a shared understanding of a process flow while seeing where and how their unique perspectives contribute the most value. Basadur describes that, as a result of using the system, people are able to “synchronize their different ways of thinking, respect differences and work together.”
Uncovering trends at the level of society and culture
All of this research inspired the faculty members to think about why teamwork presented so many unique challenges for university students (and many professionals including professors). If elementary students could learn to work in teams and to achieve goals, why is it so difficult for many adults to work productively in teams? Do we not gain mastery of process skills through experience as part of our normal human development?
To understand answers to these questions, Herron faculty members considered perspectives from social scientists including Robert D. Putnam, Director of The Saguaro Seminar and The Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. Author of Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Putnam describes how people in many contemporary societies are living more individualistic, self-reliant existences. As a result, many people are living without the quality of trust and without the quality of social connections that was more common fifty years ago. This individualism is more opposed to collectivism, thus many people have less desire and opportunity to develop the skills that are necessary to engage in collaborative work. In America, these trends in contemporary society have conspired to destroy what was previously an essential aspect of American-ness. Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, Putman writes, “When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the Americans' propensity for civic association that most impressed him as the key to their unprecedented ability to make democracy work. ‘Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition,’ he observed, ‘are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types--religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute… Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.’ ”
Responding to new challenges
The need for people to learn and practice team processes and process skills takes on special urgency when we consider the nature of the shifts affecting our early 21st century world. As a faculty member observing from the trenches of higher education it is interesting to see parallel shifts happening in a variety of domains. Shifts in the academy are responding to the emergence of new values for translating ‘pure’ research discoveries into practical applications to improve the lives of people. Shifts at the level of the business enterprise are responding to the emergence of new values for integrating truly people-centered perspectives into product and service developments. Shifts at the level of culture and society are responding to the emergence of new values for understanding the implications of our collective choices to embrace or deny a sustainable relationship with the planet. All of these changes require people to be able to work together in cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams. While the faculty members at Herron initially identified the need to help students learn process and process skills as a means to an end to become better designers in collaborative, cross-disciplinary contexts, the lessons may end up being the most valuable transferable skills for a world in flux.
Learning to Work in Teams
Design Management Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, Summer 2007
>>> download full document
L E A R N I N G . T O . W O R K . I N . T E A M S
The concept of design as interdisciplinary collaboration is an easy sell. Putting it into practice is another matter. A diverse group of people can simultaneously work on the same problem, but that can be quite different from working together. In a university setting, Christopher Vice shares the tactics and strategies he finds stimulate creative options and nurture the cooperative development and implementation of outcomes.
Published here in an alternate version
Reconfiguring HOW
Among the most challenging aspects of being an educator today is adapting to the continuous change occurring all around us. People in businesses, governments, and institutions of all sorts are wading knee-deep through the sea change brought in by the deluge of data and connectivity of our hyper information culture, the acceleration of revolutions in advanced scientific and technological innovations, and the rise of global interdependence with greater incidence of cross-cultural encounters. Journalists like Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, or design writers like John Thackara, author of In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, hold up a mirror to reflect contemporary realities, helping us to see change as it is happening.
Many, too, have documented the fundamental shift in the way that business processes are managed, having moved from linear hierarchical progression to collaborative parallel processing. Fewer professionals wait for a project to roll into their department assembly worker-style so that they can add their layer of functional expertise. It is less common and less acceptable for R&D specialists to “create something in the lab and then throw it over the wall to the marketing guys and say, 'OK, now go sell it…’”
Yet, today many design education programs still embrace curricula that isolate designing from contextual issues and emphasize the development of idiosyncratic creative perspectives.
Rethinking traditional design curricula
In light of the realities of a continuously reconfiguring world, my colleagues at Indiana University Herron School of Art and Design and I recognized that traditional studio approaches to design education might limit students’ abilities to be successful designers in any roles other than production designers. Additionally, we recognized that a more relevant design education could better equip students for their personal lives as citizens in a world that is becoming increasingly complex, a world that will likely remain in a constant state of change for the foreseeable future. I suppose we could have ignored what we saw happening all around us and continued on what was at that time the present course but we thought we could do better for our students and so we struck out in a somewhat idealistic way on a journey of rethinking and redevelopment. It has not always been smooth sailing but we have learned a lot and I think made great progress towards our goal.
How might Herron become a leading school of new design leadership?
In doing our initial fact-finding we noted an increasing need for young graduates to work in teams but a significant degree of misunderstanding and even resistance to such a concept among students. When reading comments posted on web blogs and online discussion boards like core77.com and underconsideration.com/speakup/ it was clear that many design students regard potential collaborators, clients and even audiences as enemy challengers and harbingers of compromise. Early on we became determined to find better ways.
WHAT WE DID
In a series of curriculum revisions, faculty members redirected the focus of learning to emphasize collaborative creative process knowledge and the requisite process skills to perform real world team-based creative problem solving in complex, fuzzy situations.
At Herron today students, progressively encounter more challenging problems as they develop higher-level skills through experiential learning. Initially design students focus on gaining foundational technical skills. In their second year, design students work independently to develop solutions to real world design briefs that require an intensive engagement with audiences and contexts. Students describe and respond to the audiences and contexts that solutions must address, including recognition of physical, cognitive, cultural, and social human factors, as well as, the technological and economic drivers that shape design decisions.
In their third year, design students begin to collaborate with students in their own design field in partnership with external clients to develop solutions to problems that have not been fully framed. Students focus on identifying unarticulated opportunities for innovation and reframing the understanding of a given situation so that it responds to the needs of all the stakeholders.
Ultimately, in their fourth year, design students participate in collaborations that include students from multiple disciplines in the university. So far teams have been composed of students of design, anthropology, public affairs, public history, bio ethics and informatics. Working in integrated teams, students have conducted people-centered research, provided strategic consultations and developed design solutions. One team partnered with Marion County Circuit and Superior Court (Indianapolis) to improve public participation in and the experience of jury service. Another group worked two years to develop an exhibition titled Fit to Breed? The History and Legacy of Indiana Eugenics, 1907~2007 that examined the relevance of the history of surgical sterilization and other eugenic measures to contemporary issues in human genetics, public health, reproductive health, mental health, and the law.
This approach at the undergraduate level provided Herron’s faculty members with experiences that informed the development of a second proposal for a new graduate design program that takes a cross-disciplinary approach to design thinking and design leadership. Faculty members in the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the Purdue University School of Engineering and Technology participated in planning course work for the new graduate program at Herron. The curriculum is structured so that when fully implemented there will be three tiers of cross-functional, cross-disciplinary learning. For example, an MBA student might take two team-based design courses to earn credit in an “Enterprise Experience in Design Thinking.” By taking several more courses in design, an MBA student could earn a “Graduate Certificate in Design Thinking.” Alternatively, an MBA student might add an additional year of graduate design study to pursue a second joint master’s degree in Design Methods.
Encountering problems with group work
While the new undergraduate curriculum embraced an incremental approach to prepare students to tackle increasingly complex problem types and problem contexts, the curriculum did not adequately prepare students for working with others. Team members required long periods of time to form working relationships and ultimately lacked trusting bonds when faced with challenging situations. Students communicated to professors that the experience was like learning to swim by being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool.
Without the benefit of team process knowledge or team skills, students unwittingly created what J. Richard Hackman, author of Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, calls co-acting groups. Hackman writes, “It is easy to tell who is in a co-acting group because members usually work in proximity to one another… But each member has an individual job to do, and that job’s completion does not depend on what the others do.” Lacking shared understanding and values for working in collaborative groups, students established a “divide and conquer” approach to responsibilities. This way they could each engage their own individualistic personal processes and rely on their own intuition and experience. If project goals were not realized, team members could blame others for not completing their “to do” lists. Alternatively, Hackman regards true teams as, “groups whose task requires them to work together to produce something—a product, service, or decision for which members are collectively accountable and whose acceptability is potentially assessable.”
As a result of the difficulties that students faced in the first iterations of the new collaborative design courses, faculty members decided to emphasize and integrate core values for developing a shared understanding of creative problem solving when working in cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams. Everyone realized that the design curriculum needed to incorporate team process knowledge and team skills development with a goal of building students’ capacity to do shared work. The faculty accepted that by adding team related content they were expanding the scope of their teaching responsibilities. To be successful, the professors had to learn more about teamwork. Based on feedback from students, it was clear that students needed a conceptual framework for understanding the various work styles and problem solving preferences of others. Students expressed that they did not understand why “some people just want to talk all the time,” or why others wanted to “rush to making things without first figuring out what was needed.”
HOW WE DID IT
Embracing systems level perspectives
In our research to identify new methods to improve group processes, Herron faculty members repeatedly encountered ‘synchronizing’ and ‘unifying’ as themes. In the book Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World, Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro invoke systems level thinking as unifying strategy. “Learn to fix the system, not just the symptom,” they write. “To succeed as a leader (or, for that matter, as an individual), you need to unify: your purpose, your strategy, your people and the way they interact, your structure and process, your metrics and rewards, your culture.”
At another early point in their search to become better at teaching team work skills, the Herron faculty members attended a presentation delivered by Harry Boyte, founder and co-Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Boyte articulated the core theory and practice of “everyday politics” through which citizens can “master essential political skills, such as understanding issues in public terms, mapping complex issues of institutional power to create alliances, raising funds, communicating, and negotiating across lines of difference.” In giving examples of the application of everyday politics in real life, Boyte described citizens engaged in processes of collaborative creative problem solving. Boyte’s most powerful examples of the principles of everyday politics in action were the outcomes of Public Achievement, a program dedicated to teaching children from elementary school to high school to use everyday political skills to work collectively in local communities to effect change. Through Public Achievement, young people have worked on a range of issues from creating playgrounds in communities that lacked facilities to establishing a productive dialogue where none previously existed between community members and officers in a local police precinct.
While Boyte frames process skills as the skills of everyday politics, Dr. Mary Kirlin, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Sacramento conducts research on what she calls “civic skills.” In her published literature review, CIRCLE Working Paper 06: The Role of Civic Skills in Fostering Civic Engagement, Kirlin outlines “a typology of civic skills made up of the four dominant skill categories that emerged in the research: organization, communication, collective decision-making, and critical thinking.” In identifying overlapping sets of process skills that are essential for making group work productive, both Boyte and Kirlin help establish our understanding of what students need to learn.
By thinking about how processes and process skills for cross-functional, cross-disciplinary design teams connected to both everyday political skills and civic skills for creative problem solving in communities, the Herron team tapped into new systems level perspectives for thinking about the conditions necessary for designing with integrated teams.
Discovering NextD
Early in the effort to incorporate team process knowledge and team skills into the curriculum, Herron faculty members discovered NextDesign Leadership Institute in New York. Launched in 2002 by GK VanPatter and Elizabeth Pastor, NextD was conceived as an experiment in innovation acceleration for the design education community and “to help raise awareness regarding how the challenges of cross-disciplinary innovation leadership have radically changed at the leading edge of the marketplace and how those changes are impacting designers.” Prior to launching NextDesign Leadership Institute, VanPatter and Pastor were co-founders of Scient's Innovation Acceleration Lab. They were both educated as designers. In the summer of 2005 members of the Herron faculty, including myself, attended a NextD summer workshop and there we saw others far ahead in what they refer to as the rerethinking of design. At NextD they talk about framed and unframed challenges, cross-disciplinary behaviors and skills. Coming from sense-making backgrounds VanPatter and Pastor had already developed many explanatory visual models regarding how the nature of work for designers and others is changing and why. They described what innovation looks like from an inclusive human-centered perspective. In a one-day experiential learning workshop I was not only inspired but I saw a lot of things being taught that we wanted to be teaching at Herron. NextD was the closest model that I had seen so far to what we at Herron idealistically had in mind. VanPatter and Pastor speak and model the language of adaptable innovation and show practical examples from their own practice. They talk of teaching designers the language underneath all design processes that will allow designers to work more effectively in what they call the “strategic space”. In that space designers have the ability to help with framing all kinds of challenges, not just graphic, product or service related challenges.
The Focus of NextD is on significantly building HOW skills as opposed to WHAT skills. In the NextD world they talk about HOW skills having a much longer shelf life then WHAT skills. They talked about Charles Eames and the famous question; What are the boundaries of design? They were not afraid of history! As an educator it was a line of thinking that resonated with me. The NextD workshop provides only a partial but very useful view into the many tools, frameworks and models that VanPatter and Pastor use in their own innovation consulting business, Humantific. For us discovering NextDesign Leadership Institute was an important building block in our curriculum redevelopment. We emerged from the NextD experience charged up and confident that we were on the right track. Being faced with updating a visual communications program what I saw VanPatter and Pastor doing was particularly meaningful to me. More then anything else it helped me understand what was possible if you keep an open mind to others within the field of design and beyond.
Their work is deeply influenced by the sense-making focus of Richard Saul Wurman and the advanced strategic problem solving theories developed by Dr. Min Basadur, founder of the Basadur Center for Applied Creativity Research and author of The Power of Innovation. Dr, Basadur taught innovation to MBA students at the McMaster University for many years. Basadur Group and NextD are long time collaborators. In essence VanPatter and Pastor have created a hybrid toolbox combining visual sense-making and advanced strategic problem solving. NextD has become a good friend of Herron. Our students read all materials on the NextD site so even though we are geographically distant from each other we feel like they are part of our Herron family.
Discovering Basadur Applied Creativity
Through NextD I learned that Basadur pioneered a proprietary “method of applied creativity that interconnects a process of creative problem solving with skills and tools to make that process work.” The method, called the Simplex System, builds applied creativity skills in individuals, teams, and organizations.
The Simplex System provides solutions to the many problems that can occur during teamwork. By establishing clear delineations between content (disciplinary knowledge and expertise that constitute what your are doing) and process (the steps for how you are doing it), the Simplex System eliminates the confusion that can erupt when team members substitute content for process. By representing the steps in the process visually, the Simplex System provides team members with a roadmap that they can follow together. By identifying process skills that are essential for following the process (including valuing, creating and constructively evaluating different points of view), the Simplex System prepares team members for the orchestration of collaborative creative problem solving.
Emphasizing the importance of preparing people to work in teams, Basadur states, “Teams cannot just be thrown together. To work effectively they need group skills training before they begin. There may be a learning curve in the beginning but the process is designed to be simple and the impact of mastering such skills is significant. We have an equation that we use to underline the need for both process and process skills:
INNOVATIVE RESULTS =
CONTENT (What) + PROCESS (How) +PROCESS SKILLS (How Skills).”
Identifying personal preferences in creative problem solving
By recognizing that process skills are intimately connected to interpersonal communication skills, the system acknowledges all the human traits and characteristics that team members bring to collaborative situations. By promoting shared understanding of how and why people respond differently to problem solving processes, the system seeks to disarm the agendas and conflicts that can arise when people interact.
The battles of wills and communication conflicts that occurred when the Herron students first encountered group work demonstrated that new tools were needed to bring people together. Initially the faculty members explored the idea of utilizing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) Assessment as an instrument to help students understand how and why they work and interact with others in particular ways. However, within Basadur’s Simplex System they discovered a more useful tool that is explicitly framed around the issues of creative problem solving. The Basadur Creative Problem Solving Profile is a tool for revealing one’s “own creative style and respecting those of others.”
When each team member completes the Basadur Creative Problem Solving Profile by responding to a series of questions, they discover their own unique blend of four creative problem solving preferences: Generating, Conceptualizing, Optimizing, Implementing.
Basadur describes how each of these four preferences can be connected to construct a circular diagram that represents a model for creative problem solving. “The creative process cycles through four stages. Generation (of new problems and opportunities) flows into Conceptualization (defining and understanding the challenges and creating new, potentially useful ideas), which flows into Optimization (of practical solutions), which flows into Implementation (of the new solutions). Each stage requires different kinds of thinking skills.”
The profile of every person is a composite of all four preferences. Typically, one or two preferences emerge with stronger significance, though one’s profile could show a balanced embrace of all four creative problem solving preferences. Based upon which preferences are expressed the strongest, one might choose to express their profile as one of four roles within a team: Generators, Conceptualizers, Optimizers, and Implementers.
Generators create “options in the form of new possibilities or new problems that might be solved and new opportunities that might be capitalized on.”
Conceptualizers create “options in the form of alternate ways to understand and define a problem or opportunity, and good ideas that help solve it.”
Optimizers create “options in the form of ways to get an idea to work in practice and uncovering all of the factors that go into a successful implementation plan.”
Implementers create “options in the form of actions that get results and gain acceptance for implementing a change or a new idea.”
Hybrid roles are common. An individual might say, “I’m a generator / conceptualizer,” or “I’m an optimizer / implementer.”
When Herron faculty members introduce the profile tool to students, they ensure that students do not try to construct the perception of some preferences as more important or more creative than others. Basadur clearly communicates that each of the four preferences reflects modes of applied creativity. “Everyone one of us is creative, no matter what job we are doing,” writes Basadur. “We simply demonstrate our creativity in different ways. The challenge is making sure that we can express our creativity by fostering a work environment where new ideas are welcomed, where trying something different is encouraged, and where making mistakes is recognized as an important part of learning.”
Immediately after being introduced to the Simplex method and tools, students at Herron communicated a positive response. Students were asked to document their learning through active critical reflection. One student reported, “I learned that using the process skills of ‘diverging,’ ‘converging,’ and ‘deferring judgment’ really helps me look at my team members differently and therefore makes me a better group member. In my previous group, I approached ideas as ‘the devil’s advocate,’ but now I really listen to each person’s ideas which really helps in building a good rapport within the team.”
The elegance of the Simplex Applied Creativity System is that it aligns each individual’s problem solving profile with a problem solving process that requires all of the action logics. Students are readily able to establish a shared understanding of a process flow while seeing where and how their unique perspectives contribute the most value. Basadur describes that, as a result of using the system, people are able to “synchronize their different ways of thinking, respect differences and work together.”
Uncovering trends at the level of society and culture
All of this research inspired the faculty members to think about why teamwork presented so many unique challenges for university students (and many professionals including professors). If elementary students could learn to work in teams and to achieve goals, why is it so difficult for many adults to work productively in teams? Do we not gain mastery of process skills through experience as part of our normal human development?
To understand answers to these questions, Herron faculty members considered perspectives from social scientists including Robert D. Putnam, Director of The Saguaro Seminar and The Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. Author of Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Putnam describes how people in many contemporary societies are living more individualistic, self-reliant existences. As a result, many people are living without the quality of trust and without the quality of social connections that was more common fifty years ago. This individualism is more opposed to collectivism, thus many people have less desire and opportunity to develop the skills that are necessary to engage in collaborative work. In America, these trends in contemporary society have conspired to destroy what was previously an essential aspect of American-ness. Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, Putman writes, “When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the Americans' propensity for civic association that most impressed him as the key to their unprecedented ability to make democracy work. ‘Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition,’ he observed, ‘are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types--religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute… Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.’ ”
Responding to new challenges
The need for people to learn and practice team processes and process skills takes on special urgency when we consider the nature of the shifts affecting our early 21st century world. As a faculty member observing from the trenches of higher education it is interesting to see parallel shifts happening in a variety of domains. Shifts in the academy are responding to the emergence of new values for translating ‘pure’ research discoveries into practical applications to improve the lives of people. Shifts at the level of the business enterprise are responding to the emergence of new values for integrating truly people-centered perspectives into product and service developments. Shifts at the level of culture and society are responding to the emergence of new values for understanding the implications of our collective choices to embrace or deny a sustainable relationship with the planet. All of these changes require people to be able to work together in cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams. While the faculty members at Herron initially identified the need to help students learn process and process skills as a means to an end to become better designers in collaborative, cross-disciplinary contexts, the lessons may end up being the most valuable transferable skills for a world in flux.
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Suggested Readings
Basadur, Min. The Power of Innovation. Toronto: Applied Creativity Press, 1995.
VanPatter, G.K., and Min Basadur. “Innovation: Teaching HOW Now!” NextD Journal: ReRethinking Design, Volume ONE, Conversation. 1.1 (2003), http://www.nextd.org/02/01/01/index.html.
Hackman, J. Richard. Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
Katzenbach, Jon, and Douglas Smith. The Wisdom of Teams: Creating The High Performance Organization. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1993.
Yamashita, Keith, and Sandra Spataro. Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your team, and Your World. New York: Portfolio, Penguin Group, 2004.
Boyte, Harry. Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life. Philadelphia: Penn, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Putman, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.
Putman, Robert, Editor. Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2002.