[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi, everyone. Today I want to tell you a story that pulls together many of the Creative Diversity Concepts that we've been covering. My aim is to show you how they fit together, so that you can apply them in your own lives, as well. A few years ago I was working with a colleague at another university. Now we're both mechanical engineers, we both do robotics research so we have a lot in common. So I figured this would be easy, it would be fun, right? Well it was, but there were some surprises in store, too. We were working on a summer program with business and engineering students. They were on mixed teams and they were working on projects from corporate sponsors. The idea was to give them experience working on real world problems and also collaborating with people who thought differently than they did. So my role on the project was to teach them about Creative Diversity. First, we looked at their creative levels. Business and engineering, they're different. But they were all Juniors, so they all had some common experiences in college. I also gave them several assessments of creative style, including the KAI that we've talked about in this course. No surprise, I find a wide diversity of styles across the whole group. So to help them deal with that diversity, I gave them a workshop on Creative Collaboration. Some of the exercises they did in teams of similar styles, and sometimes they worked on exercises in groups that had very different styles. The first surprise came when I had them working on teams with similar styles. I was having them write about the advantages and disadvantages of being the style they were. Kind of a paradox of structure exercise. And one of the teams disappeared. I mean they disappeared. I finally found them in the elevator. They had actually pushed the stop button so they were suspended between two floors. Now you can probably guess this was the least structured team out of all of them. And it was a really great example of that kind of behavior. It's also a great way to unnerve your professor. Now once they started working on their projects we had them use idea journals so they could write down their thoughts and their feelings, both about the projects and about working with people who had different ways of thinking. When they shared those journals with us later, it was no surprise to us to find that the teams with the biggest cognitive gaps, that means the biggest differences in their creative levels and styles, they seemed to have the most conflict. They knew that they needed that Creative diversity to get the project done, but sometimes managing those differences was emotionally draining for them. Now, the teams that had smaller cognitive gaps, they had some problems of their own. Maybe they agreed on how much structure they needed, but they didn't agree on what it should look like. But still, in the end, they all finished their projects, and everyone declared the experience a success. Well, now we came to the next step, publishing the results. We're professors, right? Well, my colleague and I, we've written lots of papers and we've gone a lots of conferences, so we thought that would go easily too. That's when the second surprise happened. As we were writing the paper, we were coming at it from very different ways. My colleague really paid attention to the details and I was more interested in the abstract concepts. So I would get the paper and I take out all the details, and then I put in the abstract things. He get the paper, he take out all the abstract things and he put in the details. We were both afraid that this was going to just explode our collaboration; we were getting kind of frustrated. So, we applied the Creative Diversity Principles to ourselves. And we discovered that my colleague was about three standard deviations more structured, more adapted in Kirkman's terms, than I was. Aha. We suddenly realized we weren't trying to inconvenience each other or frustrate each other on purpose. We were both treating this problem in the best way we knew how. But we were coming at it from very different perspectives. That's when our mutual respect really kicked in. We were will, willing to work hard to make sure that this project stayed on track. So if something was really important to him, a particular detail, we left it in. And if an abstract concept was really important to me, we left that in. But when we didn't really care, we would negotiate. We would figure it out together. So we finally finished the paper. It got accepted. And here's where the third surprise comes in. My colleague got on the plane and flew off to present the paper. And while he was at the conference, he called me and he was so excited. He says, we won! I said, we won, what? I didn't know there was a contest. Well it turned out, we had won a best paper award at that conference. It was the first time it had ever happened for either one of us. And so you see the value, of, of figuring out how to bridge those cognitive gaps. How to listen for value from somebody. Who, who thought very differently. It was very real for us that day. And I've never forgotten that experience. Now I purposely look for people who think differently than I do. Sometimes I look for people who think with a lot more structure. Sometimes I look for people who think with a lot less. And I leave myself open to hearing the value that they bring. I hope that this example has given you some new ideas and insights about Creative Collaboration. And about how to leave yourself open to the value that other people bring, especially when they think very differently from you. That's it for today. Thanks so much for being here. Take care.
