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No output without input

Posted by Jeffrey Phillps

Ivy Ross has worked in a number of large firms to instill creativity and innovation. She has worked to bring in methods and techniques to break down barriers and create freedom and trust in the teams she worked with. The headline of the blog "No output without input" was a key point to her talk. What she meant by that was that you can't expect a team to create new interesting ideas without feeding them and giving them the inputs to get them started. For example, she had a task to create new toys that were funny. Before starting the project, she gathered her team and gave them input - a clown one day, a comedian one day, a professor who studied humor. This prepared the team and got them into the patterns of thinking to help them become more adept at creating toys that were funny.

Ross also focuses on breaking down walls and barriers. When bringing two teams together, she wanted to dramatically reduce the time it would take to get the team into their most productive "zone". To do that, she hired a documentary film maker to make short films about each employee - what their favorite hobbies are, why they do what they do, why they work in the company they work in and so forth. The team got to know each other very quickly and learned to trust each other and remove barriers.

Another idea is the idea of resonance. In another team Ivy introduced the concept of sound and shared frequency. Each team member was recorded and a sound engineer found one frequency that all the team seemed to share. He then created music based on those frequencies, and the team listened to that music before each ideation session to "resonate" more quickly.