Collaborative creativity

Charles Leadbeater, who used to advice Tony Blair, is considered a leading authority on innovation and creativity and considered one of the top management thinkers on Earth. He recently spoke at Picnic Amsterdam on collaborative creativity (which is the subject of his book, We Think) and put forth 5 key elements of this phenomenon:

1. Diversity is king, participants need to think differently and have different knowledge.
2. Give people ways to contribute. They need really simple ways to add their piece of information.
3. Connect people with each other by using the most suitable technology
4. The most important one: participants must have a shared sense of purpose and an individual sense of pay-off. Use a mascot or something.
5. Communities need to have some element of structure to make decisions.

He of course also pointed out how the media environment has changed (mainstream media vs Youtube, WordPress and Twitter kind of thing) as well as how it’s now commonly understood that creativity is not the product of one brilliant mind, but “most creative ideas come from people blending and mixing things”. He also reminded us that not all collaboration leads to creativity and can become boring from excess consensus or lead to nothing if there’s too much chaos in the group.

Images courtesy of www.charlesleadbeater.net

Consumption metaphors and neural activation

I am still not sure if this is very interesting or very creepy, but let me briefly describe it. Marketing guru Gerald Zaltman has developed a technique over the years called Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) which gets consumers to express their deepest feelings and thoughts about a brand or product -whether they want to or not- via an encounter which goes through a series of phases.

ZMET uses visual and non-visual images gathered and/or generated by consumers to elicit and probe the metaphors that represent consumers’ thoughts and feelings about a topic.

Images are important units of analysis for marketing managers. When augmented by consumers’ explanations during careful probing by an interviewer, the images provide a clear idea of what consumers really think and feel. Almost invariably these insights are far deeper and more clear than the insights of verbal discussions alone. Although many images are visual, images may take other forms (tactile, olfactory, auditory…). Whatever the form (technically, every image is a neural activation), an image represents a thought or feeling consumers have about, say, privacy, treating heartburn and indigestion, or the meaning of art in their daily lives, or what they think a company thinks of them. Therefore, images are referred to as metaphors.

A metaphor is the representation of one thing (a thought, feeling, action) in terms of another thing (a picture of someone screaming, a swimming pool, the color blue…). During a ZMET interview, verbal descriptions of the thoughts and feelings represented by these images are collected to help researchers understand their meaning. Strong evidence exists that these verbal descriptions are far more complete and far more useful to managers because they were stimulated initially by these images (or metaphors).

I am not sure if I would call this ”a well developed research technique” or just a methodology that gives me the creeps. Of course it’s a technique that, beyond consumer products, can be extrapolated to all forms of information individuals receive, making it easier for marketers to lure us into a less cerebral approach to the social and informational environment. Intrestingly enough, if it is true that 95% of thought is unconscious, or as Zaltman calls it, “hidden knowledge”, I can only guess that it’s so very easy to guide us in one way or the other.