The Formula for Creative Meetings

Do your creative meetings multiply, or are they divisive? Are you the lowest common denominator in a brainstorm or the highest common factor when a breakthrough occurs?
One day I will address all of this and more in a pamphlet provisionally entitled The Mathematics of Creativity.
Maybe.
But having just spent 13 hours being hosed down by PowerPoint while floating along on the soothing corporate speak of a Management Consultant-led brand workshop, I was inspired to bring some maths to the eternal question of “why are some meetings so crap” (or “poorly leveraged interventions” in consultant speak).
Actually this one wasn’t crap, it was a good, productive sharing of information and initial opinions.

The formula is created by doug hall.

C = (DxS)/F
Where :
C = quality of creative output (note “quality”, not “quantity”)
D = diversity of people in the meeting
S = amount of stimulation experienced by people in the meeting
F = fear level of people in the meeting
Now my particular beef is not the normal agency whinge that management consultants don’t understand creativity (darling), but more a worry that they don’t seem to know how to push for high levels of creativity in meetings. For them a meeting is a meeting and is run like all meetings. I think creative agencies could teach them a trick or two.
But now is not the time to go all creative and fluffy, but to illustrate my point with some hard numbers.



To simplify things, let’s say that each of Doug’s variables of Diversity, Stimulation and Fear can have three settings low, normal or good. And let’s quantify that on a three point scale of 1, 2 and 3. Now, with those numbers, a superficial understanding of the creative dynamic might say that a good meeting is just 50% (3/2) more productive than an average meeting.
But applying Doug’s formula, the meeting I experienced was creatively “average” in three distinct ways and, as I shall mathematically show in a moment, fell well short of its creative potential.