So the bright young things at the Foreign Office have been getting ideas. Worse, as Sir Humphrey used to say in “Yes Minister”, they have been getting new ideas, which are, well, dangerous.
This time was no exception. Someone had called for a few ideas around the Pope’s visit. Maybe it was part of a wider security exercise to protect The Pope. Anyway, a group of people was assembled and (we are told) a brainstorming took place.
From time to time I have offered help to Government departments about creativity and brainstorming. I offer the following as a plausible explanation of what happened.
First, and critically, it is unlikely that the group could be considered a trained group, and more likely to have comprised those available and deemed to have some competence and availability. This is important, because a trained group with an experienced moderator behaves rather differently to a less experienced one. (Think form, storm, norm, perform, if you like). Inexperienced groups tend to regress to a more infantile state in which repressed thoughts are released. In keeping with one brainstorming principle, anything suggested gets recorded. That is actually justified – outrageous ideas can sometimes be ‘tamed’ to have novelty and potential relevance and feasibility.
An anti-catholic plot by members of the FO? I would not discount the possibility that some of the brainstormed ideas came from people who attended good Catholic Schools.
So, my guess is, that under conditions in which free thinking has been encouraged, free associations took place. Many associations will be not so much free as conditioned. The triggers induced by the concept The Pope include faith, The Vatican, infallibility, but also terms from recent news headlines including abortion, birth control, and child abuse.
The team would have generated all sorts of ideas including fantasy remarks of the kind which were leaked to the media.
In the spirit of brainstorming, these triggers would produce a further cascade of ideas from which the suggestions such as a Pope’s condom, and a visit to an abortion clinic would be likely. Is this creative? Creativity researchers would say probably not. An idea needs to be rated new, feasible, and or potential value to be considered a creative concept. Brainstorming is actually a venerable but rather weak approach to overcoming some blocks to creativity. There are more complex techniques found to be more effective when used (sorry to repeat this) by a trained team with skilled facilitation.
In any event, this team would have arrived at a set of ideas including a lot of fantasy remarks of the kind which were leaked to the media. Which brings me to a second point. I urge brainstorming teams to treat the raw output as highly dangerous (yes, I’m with Sir Humphrey on this). Outsiders just will not get what has been going on, and will question the competence or even the sanity of the group. Better, I suggest, to treat such ideas as highly confidential. The sponsors should be presented only with the most promising few ideas, those which can be acted on. In this case, the confidentiality could be and should have been treated as a matter of security.
There is a possibility that a disaffected member of the brainstorming group may have wanted to blow a whistle about what had been experienced. That doesn’t affect my main points, but would be consistent with the behaviour of a team that had not sorted out its psychological contract at the start.
So there we have it. An anti-catholic plot by members of the FO? I would not discount the possibility that some of the brainstormed ideas came from people who attended good Catholic Schools. It’s my Jewish friends who tell the best Jewish Jokes… and I don’t think it makes them anti-Semitic.
Tudor Rickards is Professor of Creativity and Organisational Change at Manchester Business School. His earlier career included posts in a medical school, and at an industrial Research and Development Laboratory. He has published extensively on creativity, innovation, and change management. He has won numerous awards for teaching in these areas, and holds visiting appointments including The Alex Osborn visiting professorship for creativity at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is co-founder of the Creativity and Innovation Management Journal, and of the European Association for Creativity and Innovation.