Thanks to the team at MFX Partners, I’ve developed a love of exploring the unknown through the design thinking process. It really is contagious! And the ideas and energy that flow between our creative team during a meeting or brainstorming session have often led to some incredible and new ways of solving problems for our clients.
Elizabeth Johansen, the Director of Product Development at Design that Matters, a company that creates new products and services for the poor in developing countries is passionate about creating positive social impact through design. In a blog post for CoLab Radio, she calls this group exercise cultivating “the group mind”.
No, it’s not a matter of everyone involved thinking alike and following each other like sheep. Rather, it’s a collaborative experience where members of the group are comfortable and free to be themselves and meld individual ideas and personalities together to become a collective that opens new doors they would never have discovered without the help of the whole. I should also mention that Johansen worked as a product designer at IDEO for 8 years—so she knows her stuff.
When it comes to forming a solid “group mind”, Johansen recommends taking advice from Truth in Comedy or what’s known as the improv comedy bible by authors Charna Halpern, Del Close, and Kim Johnson. The book claims that a “group mind” is formed, “Once [a participant] puts his own ego out of the way…stops judging the ideas of others—instead, he considers them brilliant…pays close attention to each other, hearing and remembering everything, and respecting all that they hear. The goal…is to connect the information created out of the group ideas—so it’s easily capable of brilliance.”
Truth in Comedy goes on to recommend the “yes, &…” approach, which is one of the most concrete techniques for cultivating “group mind”. The approach is described as follows:
“[Participants] agree with each other to the Nth degree. If one asks the other a question, the other must respond positively…answering “No” leads nowhere… Each new initiation furthers the last one, and the scene progresses. The acceptance of each other’s ideas brings the players together, and engenders a “group mind.”