Social nature of creativity: how did the team dynamic affect creative expression during

Reflection on Objective 3 : On a team level, when working on eco-design ideation in groups, investigate the team dynamic that affects creativity.

7.3.1 The “ephemeral organization” of the workshop & cohesiveness

The workshop environment we created during the workshop design consisted of casting, location, and warm-up exercises to set the tone for the day. For example, for Solvay’s second worskhop we started the day with an ice breaker question “If you were an element of the periodic table, which would you be and why?” This set a clear tone of conviviality and ease among participants, allowing them to feel they were no longer bound by the rules, regulations and hierarchies usually present in their day-to-day.

A key difference that distinguishes Solvay’s workshop 1 (in both projects) from all other workshops in both case studies is that the participants referred to the activity as a “meeting” and not a “workshop”. It felt like a routine part of their job where their usual pressures, issues and problems were present and the social dynamic between the participants reflected the existing hierarchy of Solvay. By contrasting this to the “ephemeral organization” we created at ACME by inviting external actors, we created a setting where the usual rules no longer applied, and the hierarchy was flattened by the presence of external actors. This disruption to the usual setting of what constitutes a “meeting” proved to be extremely effective in increasing creativity.

The ephemeral environment of the workshops led many participants to feel like they got closer to their colleagues. There was a sense of team-building and disruption of existing relationships to create new collectives (Dubois et al., 2014).

7.3.2 Loafing and dominating personalities: interference of politics

For most of the groups in both of ACME’s workshops and in most groups in Solvay’s creativity workshops, participants expressed good collaboration and a respective, fruitful working environment for idea generation. When asked specifically about “evaluation apprehension”, all participants said they felt comfortable sharing their ideas openly and were not afraid of judgement.

There were two cases however where we saw one person dominating the conversation, and some cases where social loafing was also present.

First, in both of Solvay’s LCA-driven workshops, we saw that hierarchical power in a culture where organizational structure is highly respected, shifted the conversation towards their political interests. This had a profound effect on the creativity of the group.

One manager had very specific expectations of the value that the LCA results and SPM tool could bring. There was a misconception that the life cycle assessment would shed light on inefficiencies in the manufacturing process, which would lead to opportunities for innovation in the chemical processes. The idea that eco-design would serve a specific purpose and lead to a specific result by one person with high level of hierarchical power in the team made the rest of the group frustrated yet obligated to follow their lead. This manager’s stark imposition that the group turn towards chemical processes was what led the group to reframe the problem.

Second, we saw the dominance of the “technical expert” constrain the creativity that might emerge from the “non-expert”, leading to social loafing (Stroebe & Diehl, 1994) from that non-expert.

During Solvay’s creativity-driven workshop for SONIC, the experts in the team were judgemental of novel ideas from non-experts. For the team working on the “circular economy”, one non-expert felt that the experts were judging the ideas too quickly. They felt like their ideas were being discarded and invalidated. After trying to participate, this participant felt helpless and retreated from participating for the remainder of the workshop. We also saw this at ACME’s LCA-driven workshop, where the “fixated team” was composed of two technical experts and one marketing expert. The marketing expert knew intuitively that they had to redirect the conversation towards something more innovative, but felt inadequate to question the expertise of the experts (Le Masson et al., 2014).

Third, we saw that an external expert with a dominant personality felt they needed to share their knowledge with the internal participants. Particularly during the ACME creativity-driven workshop, for the team working with the foresight scenario on “revitalizing Northern and abandoned mining communities with blockchain mining” that was designed to be a triggering piece of new knowledge. It wasn’t anticipated that the external actor part of the team would already be an expert in this field. The external expert therefore spent most of the time in the group sharing their knowledge and experience in first nations communities, and the ACME team members

retreated to merely asking this participant questions rather than using their creativity to explore concepts. The team stayed heavily in the knowledge-space and did not capitalize on it to explore the concept-space. When some concepts were suggested, the external expert would often say “No”, and explain why their idea wouldn’t work based on their experience.

During interviews after the workshop, the participants conceded that they felt they hadn’t done the exercise properly, they felt like they weren’t creative and felt inadequate to share ideas since they were in the present of such a dominant person imposing so much new knowledge on them. The external expert said “no” to ACME’s ideas, and no one at ACME felt empowered to challenge their knowledge and judgement. This same external participant did however challenge ACME’s conception of the dominant design of the substation business model. During a discussion about Product-Service-Systems, the ACME participants were more likely to say “we don’t do this” or

“this would never be possible for substations”, whereas the external expert challenged them to seriously reconsider this option as they see a need for it in the market.

7.3.3 Collective fixation

Due to the lack of diversity in the casting for the workshops at Solvay, we saw a collective fixation in both the concept-space and knowledge-space (Le Masson et al., 2014). At ACME, the nature of the participatory design casting led to breaking both the concept-space and knowledge-space collective fixation.

At Solvay, the homogeneous team with differing levels of expertise did not trigger new ideas since there was an underlying belief from most participants that the “expert” was the source of creative ideas.

Participatory design at ACME was particularly helpful in breaking collective fixation. The exposure not only to different knowledge, skills and concepts, but to different political interests, values and points of view of the value chain of the product allowed for high creativity. Especially with respect to a life cycle approach, having stakeholders from all life cycle stages around the table during a design exercise helps in creating joint accountability for the impacts along the value chain.

At Solvay, the absence of actors from the life cycle stages blinded them from those interests and led them to feel unaccountable for them.