Let's use this thread to share best practices and stories from the field.

I use the Styles primarily with clients on innovation/ideation work. On Monday and Tuesday I worked with an agrochemical company -- 8 individuals -- on generating product ideas that leveraged a technology they were being offered, so that they could make a decision about whether to license the technology.

As usual, I had everyone take the Innovation Styles in advance of the session, and we got 100% participation (I usually get in the high 90's percentage-wise, and 100% with small groups. It's just a matter of making it clear how easy/fun it is, of tracking participation and reminding people to complete it).

I didn't teach anything about Innovation Styles in the session, though I did briefly review the 4 styles when discussing a tendency that the group might have to be unfocused (all 8 scores were below and to the right of the Intuiting/Sensing dimension, hence we had a room that was more Perceiving than Judging. This translates into a tendency to remain broad rather than focused. As the facilitator, I new that we were being asked, as a group, to come up with a decision by the end of the two days. As I am also more of a P than a J, I had to counteract my tendency for broadness and keep the group focused. And I reminded them that we needed to compensate for our preference for broadness.

I used the Innovation Styles to create teams of 2 and 4 throughout the two days, sometimes intentionally creating diverse teams, at other times teams of similar or close Styles. The basic rule I use is that if I want diversity between the different teams, I create teams of similar styles and give them less structure / less of a process to work with. That way each team is more likely to use a different process / generate different ideas than other teams.

For example, one of the tasks was to break up into teams of 2 and visit a local home improvement store to gather customer insights. I teamed people by similar Styles, and asked each pair to spend 10 minutes planning how they would make most use of this field trip. That way we'd get a diversity of insights with different approaches taken by the different pairs.

On the other hand, if I had a very clear process or technique in mind, then I would team people by diverse innovation styles, to create balance/friction within each team. If the process is clear, then the friction of different Styles can more easily translate into productive creative friction. If the process is not clear, then there is a greater risk of the friction being channeled into discussing/running the process rather than the content.

Comments, Questions...?

I really like the way Alain describes how he decides when to put together teams with like/same Innovation Style preferences, and when he puts different styles in the same team. And his comment about giving clear processes if a team has diverse styles is important when "achieving an output" is most important.

I've often told my clients, "You have a choice. Either we can focus 70-80% on getting a task accomplished, and 20-30% on residual, longer-term learning; or we can focus 70-80% on learning skills for longer-term application and 20-30% on practicing those skills on practical tasks." When the "task" dominates, I would follow what Alain has described. When "learning" is the key objective, and task less important, then I have sometimes said to a group: "There are two basic ways that we can proceed -- either "give you a clear learning objective (such as practicing the four Innovation Styles) and then let you learn and practice what I'm teaching" or "give you an experience without saying what it's about and let you discover your own insights afterwards." (I've found that Visioning and Modifying often prefer to have the objective up front, while Experimenting and Exploring often prefer the more experiential approach.) Then I give two different learning experiences based on these two approaches -- one more outcome-focused and one more experience-focused.

William Miller