Asked for three must-have ingredients in running a successful idea-generating session, VanGundy thinks a minute and replies: "One, people must have a belief that anything is possible. Two, you need a climate that's conducive to creative thinking, one that results in a playful atmosphere. Groups that are laughing and having the most fun are the groups producing the most ideas and the best ideas. Three, it's best to use a lot of different types of stimuli, which are both related to the challenge and unrelated to the challenge, to help trigger new associations and generate out-of-the-box thinking."
Just as crucial, he stresses, is avoiding the mistakes commonly made by corporations when they try to throw the creativity switch, all too often by rounding up the usual suspects and tossing them into a conference room for a couple of hours and ordering in sandwiches. "You don't want the same people who work together and meet together all the time," says VanGundy. "If you want to do something truly different, you have to meet differently." Meeting off-site is best. VanGrundy recommends bringing in people from different parts of the company, people with a diversity of viewpoints, making sure to salt the group with fluent idea generators. Another creativity killer starting with a whole bunch of criteria. "Companies will often start idea sessions by listing criteria for the new product or process. That places constraints on your thinking and forces people to limit their ideas. It creates a climate in which, instead of diverging in all sorts of directions to create as many ideas as you can, you're continually converging to evaluate all the ideas to see if they satisfy the criteria. It limits the number of possible ideas you can come up with and probably the quality of the ideas as well. There are three times you can judge an idea: now, later, and never. Now is not the right time."
Equally important, he feels, is to think of the emerging ideas in a new way--not, at this early stage, as new products or solutions but as more stimuli. "I like to stress that ideas are the raw material of solutions, potential stimuli for the high-quality ultimate solution," says VanGrundy. "Seeing ideas as stimuli rather than as ultimate solutions also relieves people from the pressure of having to come up with perfect ideas or solutions." Which, of course, helps generate even more ideas. The result: a self-feeding fire.
10:58 P.M.
Editing the concepts
The next blasts of creative work in the Eureka process are rarely seen by the client. Celestial representatives Siegel, Moore, and Brenner call it a day at about 11 o'clock and head back to their nearby hotel. On networked computer screens throughout the mansion, the day's raw ideas are being molded and sometimes melded into new products with marketable benefits and catchy, memorable names. In Hall's words: "This is where the rubber meets the road."
Soon after midnight, Hall stretches out on the living-room carpet near the index cards, along with fresh printouts of several of the product-concept first drafts. Pencil in hand, he reads Glass's renderings of the tea-plus-other-items collections. For instance: "Sleepytime Collection--This kit helps quiet down the day. Tea bags with a hint of cinnamon are designed to be brewed in a cup of hot milk. Lavender-aromatherapy-spray atomizer and a scented, ultrathin sachet that you place between your pillow and pillowcase to enhance your sweet dreams." The thing that's still missing, Hall knows, is a defining umbrella word.
"What do we call these things?" he asks aloud about the "tea plus" kits, glancing at the index cards for help. Everyone keeps coming back to the word kit, so Hall heads to the library and returns with a copy of J.I. Rodale's Synonym Finder. "Kit," he reads aloud. "Set, collection...implements, utensils, gear..." Nothing particularly exciting. Then his eye falls on a nearby entry: kaleidososcope.
"I like it," says Stamp.
"It works," agrees Schultz.
Hall pencils it in: "Celestial Seasonings Kaleidscope/A Celebration of Herbal Sensory Collections."
1:00 A.M.
Burning the midnight oil
The mansion's still lit up like a fraternity house at homecoming, and it's nearly as loud. At times like this, with Hall's high-decibel musical inspiration also being piped through speakers outside by the basketball and volleyball courts, the mansion's rather incongruous location in an industrially zoned area proves to be a blessing' there are no neighbors around to complain. "We don't try to get everything perfect at this stage," Hall explains. "It's more like M*A*S*H surgery."
3:50 A.M
Tactic: Make it visual
Hall faxes the day's work to WBK Design, in Cincinnati, where head designer and managing director Steve Klein heads a team poised for a six-hour turnaround of computer-generated package designs. Klein and his artists have already scanned Celestial logos and dozens of images into their computers. When Hall finally sets them loose, loose is the operative word. "I have to give them the core direction, but if I define it too much, it becomes color by numbers. I used to define it, and they'd give me pretty much what I said. But then I'm not getting the values of these incredibly talented artists, or of the writers, because it works the same way with the concept writing. It's not fun assembling a house from Lincoln Logs. It's much more fun when they're given the freedom to do something great. The basic mission is 'Wow me."
Hall doesn't bother to go home. In a bedroom on the third floor, he sets two alarms for 6 a.m.
DAY TWO
7:30 A.M.
Reality check
Hall has logged a good hour editing concepts by the time Mo Siegel, Lindsay Moore, and Keith Brenner arrive. Hall, of course, has a trademarked name for the business of day two. He calls it InterACT. Essentially it's the point at which the real work intrudes upon the blue-sky optimism of the day before, the point when, in the light of competitive realities of production problems or maybe governmental regulations, some of yesterday's cute little newborns don't look quite so hale and hearty.
