At the same time that Alex Osborn's friends (he
was the inventor of "brainstorming") were evolving the Osborn-Parnes
Method of creative problem solving, a group of men in Cambridge worked at
Arthur D. Little Company in the Invention Design Group. They became
intrigued by the way they worked together and the fact that sometimes they were
wildly successful in generating innovative thinking and yet other times came up
with routine, "been there, done that" ideas. They began to
audiotape, later videotape, their meetings to see if creative thinking were
replicable - that is, available by choice.
In 1960, they left
ADL to form Synectics®, Inc. where they continued to study their own process
and that of artistic, creative people. Ultimately, they decided that everyone
is creative and that what was necessary was a process to access that
creativity, which they proceeded to invent. The role of "process
facilitator" was created by Synectics along with a nine-step process that
is still in use today in their consulting practice.
I will share this
process in a later blog post.