One Calendar with Social Networking PowersCultivating a “Group Mind”
If you’re a designer, you already familiar with how exploring the unknown through the design thinking process can be contagious! And how the ideas and energy that come out of creative team brainstorming sessions can lead to some incredible, new ways of solving problems for clients.
Elizabeth Johansen is the Director of Product Development at Design that Matters, a company that creates new products and services for the poor in developing countries. Johansen is passionate about creating positive social impact through design through an exercise she calls cultivating “the group mind”.
Now cultivating the “group mind” doesn’t mean that everyone involved thinks alike and follows each other like lemmings. No, it’s a collaborative experience where members of a group feel comfortable and free to be themselves as they meld individual ideas and personalities together to become a collective—opening new doors they would never have discovered without the help of everyone involved.
When it comes to forming a solid “group mind”, Johansen points to Truth in Comedy, the improv comedy bible. In it authors Charna Halpern, Del Close, and Kim Johnson claim 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.”
The book also recommends a method known as the “yes, &…” approach, a concrete technique for cultivating “group mind”. Using the “yes, &…approach, “[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.”
