Group Genius

Sidebars: Creative Domains, Testing the Future

Frustration. It's 7 PM on the second day of a two-day seminar on Hilton Head, South Carolina, and the entire executive team from New York-based AM Cosmetics is incredulous. Smack-dab in the middle of a brainstorming session that was producing a concrete business plan, creativity guru Matt Taylor has pulled the plug. As the executives look on in astonishment, Taylor's colleagues silently pile candles, rubber bands, paper clips, Play-Doh, wing nuts, fishing line, and 40 other items unrelated to cosmetics at the front of the workshop space.

Then it gets worse. Taylor instructs them to equip themselves at random from the pile of objects and to use those items to make ... a toy. And not just any toy. The toys must do things. They must propel themselves up or down or sideways. They must make sounds. Or change color. Or change smell.

The cosmetics executives look at one another, then back at Taylor, who is now standing on a chair. "Oh, come on," says a serious-looking accountant-type who's here from New York for what was advertised as a workshop on the business paradigm of the 21st century -- but which now looks like a scene from "Romper Room." "You have got to be kidding."

Taylor isn't kidding. After spending four decades studying, modeling, and testing the character of creativity, the 59-year-old architect-cum-futurist knows how to work the innovative spark: how to find it, coax it out, then build it into a collective blaze that can transform companies and reenergize organizations. He and his wife, Gail Taylor, a former school teacher whose radical notions about learning and creativity nearly got her drummed out of public schools, have broken the creative process into a series of steps, or "states," through which they can guide any person, team, or enterprise to accomplish any creative project -- from bringing out a new product to remaking an entire company.

Admittedly, it is seldom a smooth trip. Participants at the Taylors' DesignShops get frustrated, angry, and rebellious. They also find that the process works, that it unleashes what the Taylors call "group genius," a collective creativity so powerful, energizing, and transformative that organizations ranging from restaurant chains to the U.S. military's aerospace test program have turned frustrating dead ends into hugely successful ventures -- in a fraction of the time required by conventional management.

And yet MGTaylor Corp. is tiny and virtually unknown. For most of the 1990s, it chalked up roughly $1 million in annual revenues. But this year MGT is operating at a rate between 10 and 15 times that. The firm is developing an agreement to create an alliance with Ernst & Young to pioneer a network of creativity-focused management centers. It already has 13 design and construction projects under way, building creativity centers and field offices for various clients. Its calendar is chock-full of dates for workshops and creativity seminars. "Up to now," Matt Taylor says, "our strategy has been stealth. We've shunned public exposure and worked by word of mouth. We are a distributed, ad hoc, sapient organization, and intend to remain so."

That a self-described stealth creativity organization would find itself on a growth bender and attracting the interest of Ernst & Young is, in the context of today's business world, both instructive and predictable. After spending most of the last two decades trying to slash their way to profitability, most companies have come to realize that a corporate strategy of self-mutilation is not the path to longevity. Nor, for that matter, is a pure technology play, since there's virtually nothing you can invent, license, or buy that your rivals can't match. The only real margin is your workforce, or more precisely, how well it works. Which explains why companies now spend billions annually on various team-building programs.

What those programs are teaching them is that there's something more important than how employees work together: how they think together. It's the prospect of this cerebral collaboration, creating patterns and products that otherwise couldn't be imagined -- this "massively parallel processing," as the Taylors put it -- that brings companies to Hilton Head. "Smart companies now realize they must innovate their way to profitability," explains Matt Taylor. "And after that, they have to keep on innovating."

Easier said than done. Creativity is hard to measure, difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to justify. So companies have identified their creative types and squirreled them away, confining creativity to a "safe" place. Worse, when companies have needed creativity, "they have assumed it was a singular event -- that they didn't need to have creativity happening all the time," says Gail Taylor, a diminutive 58-year-old with short, grayish hair and dark direct eyes.