Group Genius

After lunch participant teams scan the ecologies of tide pools, rain forests, beehives, and the human body, discovering parallels between these living systems and their company. Later they scan the present from an entirely new angle: the future. Each is assigned a cultural, political, or business trend -- such as political freedom or information exchange -- and then told to go 50 years into the future and report where that trend is and how it got there.

It's a technique the Taylors call "backcasting," and it illustrates one of the Taylors' favorite axioms: "You can't get there from here, but you can get here from there." "There" is an imagined future -- where you want your enterprise to be 5, 10, even 50 years from now. "Here" is where you are now. "The trick," says Gail Taylor, "is to try to bring back a piece of 'there' to 'here.'"

Gail has been hauling in great chunks of "there" ever since the late 1960s, when as a second-grade public-school teacher in Kansas City, Missouri she discovered that her students could learn faster than the normal curriculum could teach them. After a pupil posed a question Gail couldn't answer ("Why do soap bubbles have colors?"), she asked the class for any questions they had, about anything they wanted to know, and let them figure out how to find the answers -- giving them access to all information sources, including those off-campus.

The kids went wild, inventing information-seeking methods with more enthusiasm than she had previously witnessed. "I could literally see their thinking, it was so intense," recalls Gail. "For the first time I realized I didn't have to 'teach' creativity -- that it was innate and that every kid in the class had it."

By year's end her students were beating fifth- and sixth-graders on test scores. The results were so spectacular that school officials drew their own conclusion: Gail, already known as something of a maverick, had to be cheating.

Disgusted, she quit and in 1972 set up the Learning Exchange, a marketplace for educational innovation in an old warehouse space. While doing projects in this large open environment, Gail discovered what came to be known as the "working big" principle - having participants write or sketch ideas on huge poster boards rather than 8x11 notepads. "Small paper leads to small vision," Gail explains. "You can't see the complexity emerging from a project when everyone works from a tiny piece of paper. And you can't collaborate."

In 1976 Gail took a class entitled "Rebuilding the Future." The instructor was Matt Taylor, a designer who had begun training to be an architect when he was 12 and who seemed unable to look at a product or process without trying to make it better. An Air Force brat, Matt had grown up on bases around the world, always on the move yet never lacking for a community. In Matt's view, military culture is one of the few instances of an intentional community: a close-knit, planned enclave whose members are educated and dedicated, accustomed to high technology and "can do" practicality, and most important, committed to an overarching goal. "When I finally got out in the real world," Matt recalls, "I was shocked at the lack of rigor, at what was taken for granted, and mostly at the mindless, chasing-the-dollar mentality that served no larger purpose."

Part of Matt's interest in architecture and design was the power it afforded to recreate the kind of rigorous, purposeful community that had provided such comfort in his past. When Matt was 16 and his family lived in California, he began working in architecture firms. He apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Matt admired not only for the broad social reach of his vision but also for his almost Victorian insistence that an engineer -- the quintessential figure of action, numbers, and hard-nosed decisions -- be a person of passion, artistry, and creativity as well.

In the early 1960s Matt entered the construction industry, which he found incredibly exciting though badly managed, terribly organized, and hugely wasteful. Drawn by the possibilities of prefabricated construction, he devised a fast-track construction system and an early version of today's just-in-time delivery. He also created what he now calls a "value web," a network of all the players in a given project, from owner to laborers, that fosters communication and collaboration and makes it easier to solve problems.

By 1960 it occurred to Matt that the entire business paradigm -- the centralized, medieval-hierarchical system that he later called the "second wave," after futurist Alvin Toffler -- needed fast-tracking. Not only was business organized around a dying model, but the element that could save it, the capacity for innovation, had systematically been excluded from the process by corporate America's growing reliance on structure, chains of command, and a top-down culture. The great engineers of the late 19th century, in whom art and action found harmony, had been replaced by organization men, bureaucrats who had no interest in or understanding of the creative temperament. The feeling was mutual: creative types who once might have been drawn to the adventure and romance of business now eschewed it as crass and vulgar, says Matt, "something that you went into only if all else failed."