Developing a creativity division
Gryskiewicz describes the work he did at the Center for Creative Leadership following his return from London, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1976. Gryskiewicz describes in detail here how he worked to develop a creativity division in the late 1970s and early 1980s, discussing the various forms that division took, ranching from Innovations and Creativity Applications and Research (ICAR) and Research and Development Management Information Simulation (RADMIS).
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Stan Gryskiewicz, January 15, 1999. Interview S-0017. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
Tell me about you come back from London and begin to move very directly
into an effort to launch a whole bunch of creativity work.
- STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:
-
Right. That was Campbell again. Campbell said, "Okay,
you're back." And he said, "I know what
happens when you come back from sabbatical, you can't go back
to doing the same thing you were doing." And I said,
"Yeah, that's true. It's going to be
difficult to go back into the classroom to just do the Leadership
Development Program." So where I
[unclear] the module on creativity still in that and was
hiring other people to help with that, he asked me to set up a
creativity program. So I'm not very creative. I first called
it the Creativity Development. And there was a leadership development
division. Then we developed a creativity of the division. But then the
real break came when I was able to hire—we had about 12 to 17
people in the group that we called ICAR. And that happened in the
80's that we moved from this original stuff that Campbell
said, "Okay, you're working your Ph.D.
You're about to finish it. Know that when you finish it,
you're going to start this whole creativity
division." So there was this preliminary work, talking,
strategizing around that. And when I finished the Ph.D., he said go for
it. And eventually that Creativity Development Program, Creativity
Development Division became ICAR, which is Innovations and Creativity
Applications and Research. So the ICAR title ran and that's
where we really grew our work. And our work early on was on my
dissertation Targeted Innovation, which is a creative problem solving
course. We then took it to a course that we called Creative Leadership
for R & D managers. And it was essentially a
leadership development program but in the middle, we had a new
simulation for R & D people in an R & D setting called
RADMIS. We developed a simulation called RADMIS. We also marketed it
just to managers in R & D settings so they could be around other
scientists. We thought there was a market niche so we went after those
people. There was a man named Jim Bruce. Has that name surfaced yet?
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
No.
- STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:
-
Jim Bruce was head of R & D at Kodak and left after
Kodak's retirement, spent a year or two here on sabbatical or
transition. And he was a friend of Kenneth Clark's. And he
sat in on one of our early programs and also had been through LDP. So
his idea was you need something here that's going to keep the
R & D people interested. So he proposed developing a simulation.
And RADMIS stood for Research And Development Management Information
Simulation.
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
Okay, so it's i-s.
- STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:
-
So that was the RADMIS program. He developed it and used a programmer
from RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology, where he lived. And we
simply had a computerized simulation where project teams would work
together five to six people to get a new product to market. And in a
four hour simulation, they ran through a two year product development
cycle. And while they were doing this, we were observing them. There was
an observer who was looking for team interaction, individual behavior.
And at times, we knew that that program, the computer program, different
probes would appear of problems. We call the probes which would say
things are going well, but did you know... And we would see how groups
would handle it. So the observer knew that okay, it's about
two hours into the simulation, they're about to get probe
number one. Let's see how they'll handle it. Some
groups would take two minutes and make the decision and move on. Some
groups would take the rest just to try to handle the probe. And we would
then take that apart as the feedback setting. How did you handle this?
What was going on with the group? Here's some videotapes. And
in fact, we knew when the probe was about to come so we would turn on
the videotape and then we would go back and watch it. And so the
observer became the feedback giver in the afternoon, the process person
in the afternoon. So there were two days of content and of course
content they would need to use in the simulation which took place on
Wednesday. And then you know what? It was a full day simulation. And
then Thursday was the process feedback day. And then
Friday was the goal-setting day. So that moved along nicely but then we
decided that maybe we should—the research
project—really if we wanted to included development in that
and not just researchers, we needed to change the name of the course and
we went into the market with a new name, with some little market
research. But we decided to call it From Idea to Market Entry, FIME. And
we then extended the market niche that we thought should be present and
sold that for a couple years. So that was another course besides
[unclear] that we taught.