Group Genius

Matt found himself on a mission to reunite business and creativity and to create a community that could integrate the two. He went on a reading binge, sucking up everything he could find on systems theory, information, cybernetics, psychology, and economics. Then he distilled his view of the way things should work into equal parts elaborate models and corny axioms.

Matt and Gail were two of a kind. Just before they met, Matt had founded the Renascence Project, a "futures-oriented" research and community-development center in Kansas City devoted to urban renewal and entrepreneurship. In 1977 they married, moved to Boulder, Colorado, and began a systematic search for the conditions under which creativity flourishes. By 1980 they had produced the first DesignShops, drawing a small but committed following. Practicing what they preached as futurists, the Taylors saw a new complexity emerging. "For the first time in our history, creativity is required of all of us, all the time," says Matt. "And that requires not only a different way of thinking about management but also a completely new methodology and a new level of discipline."

But it was the go-go '80s. the rest of the world wasn't ready for the Taylors' version of "Montessori for adults." Corporate America wanted manly merger mania, not wimpy creativity, and Matt and Gail had no interest in pushing the issue. They rejected the usual management-guru shtick: write a book, make a video, do the lecture circuit, repeat the same speech endlessly. Instead, they elected to wait for the change to come.

Matt recalls asking an R&D team at a Big Three auto company how many hours a week they actually spent doing productive, value-adding work. "They thought about it and finally said, 'About four hours.' Four hours. The rest of their time was spent in meetings and other useless crap." Matt sighs.

"Structure wins." Finally the wave broke: reengineering crashed, slash-and-burn wiped out, and a new management explosion created a new business movement - one with a hunger for creativity and for the knowledge MGT was offering.

Tuesday, 10:33 AM five members of an AM Cosmetics team stand before the rest of the group, struggling to explain how they killed their own company. It's part of a "scenario challenge," a variation on back-casting in which players are handed a realistic business outcome from 1998 and asked to explain how it happened. This team's scenario: they represent AM's real-life rival, which has devised a strategy that killed AM in late 1997. "Describe the basic elements of your strategy," reads the assignment. "What made AM vulnerable? What innovations did you use? How did your strategy roll out? How did you catch AM so completely off guard?"

The objective here is several-fold. Players are being pushed out of the box, made to see their company and all its frailties in brutally honest terms. And it's not an exercise in goofy fantasy: each alternative reality a team concocts has to be backed by realistic measures. Other teams have happier scenarios in which their company is kicking its rivals' butts. Their task is to figure out, step by step, how that happened -- lessons they can immediately apply to their strategic planning.

By lunch the DesignShop's atmosphere is electric. Without waiting for the energy to subside, Matt moves into the next exercise: Vision/Mission/Strategy. Teams regroup in the main meeting area to hammer out where AM is going and how it's going to get there. There is excited talk about new product lines, new markets, new strategies. Then out of the cauldron of ideas comes a real solution to an actual marketing problem: AM will turn away a large but brutally troublesome customer, and hand over the business to its chief rival. And with the energy and resources the "loss" frees up, AM will aggressively pursue its rival's more valuable customers. It's a risky strategy, but it's in sync with the DesignShop's creative inspiration: what looks like a defeat, if executed relentlessly, will turn into a double win.

Teams break out again, each assigned a separate chunk of the company's vision: technology, marketing and image, distribution. They spend the next several hours huddled in groups, then reassemble in the main room to report out. As each team explains its contribution, ideas prompt more ideas, as well as concerns, from the others. It's a riff of massively parallel processing that could easily continue through dinner -- except for that frustratingly clever interruption called Inventions, and the challenge of building a toy.

Inventions starts promptly at 7 PM by 7:08 the pile of objects at the front of the main meeting area has been picked over. Teams line up to receive specs for their toys, which are designed to serve as AM marketing gimmicks. The specs are so outrageous -- moves up 12 inches, moves down 12 inches, changes color, or changes shape -- that participants cannot imagine creating these toys in a toy shop, much less from a pile of household detritus. And yet, within one hour, grown men and women are pawing intently through screws and tape and Styrofoam, scavenging the environment for furniture and other materials, and fashioning outlandish machines that, even at this early stage, are clearly meant to do things.