To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: better solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and increased employee engagement. Over the years, entrepreneurs have developed useful tactics and strategies to achieve these results. But when organizations try to apply them, they often encounter new obstacles and trade-offs. Engaging CPS process facilitators can be a solution to get to these three things.

What are CPS process facilitators?

Before we dive into the content just a little side hustle … What are these CPS process facilitators? CPS process facilitators are trained in facilitating Creative Problem Solving. Using insights into diversity (such as problem-solving styles), they ensure that everyone around the table has valuable input. Further, they create a productive microclimate that increases both risk-taking (e.g., expressing non-obvious options) and the engagement of each thinking group member. Furthermore, CPS process facilitators have tools to structure the processes within the CPS thinking framework with the client’s intended goal always serving as a compass.

A successful innovation process produces three things.

Better solutions. We often choose obvious solutions. After all, we prefer to take the sure way with usual ways and get classic solutions. After all, when you do things the way you’ve always done them, you get results the way you’ve always gotten them. Taking a different approach or asking new interesting questions can help teams come up with more original ideas. You need new ideas to get different and better results. This is where it is best to engage the brainpower of more people.

Process guidance is highly recommended here because there is a risk that some teams may endlessly delve into a problem, while action-oriented team members may be too impatient to take the time to figure out what question to ask. Here they you already have an initial tension between exploring and exploiting. With new questions you are more likely to explore, but action-oriented managers are more likely to emphasize exploitation and tackle the “obvious” question directly and solve it (with an obvious solution). Afterwards, it often turns out that this was not the superior solution the organization needed.

It is also well known that including different voices from a diversity of colleagues in the process can improve solutions. Diverse perspectives provide the necessary richness in insights but when conversations between employees with opposing views degenerate into divisive discussions it leads to conflict. People play on the person instead of the ball. This is counterproductive. One of the tasks of the CPS process facilitator is to use the right thinking tools to steer unproductive discussions toward productive debates.

Lower risks and costs of change. Uncertainty is inevitable in innovation. That’s why creative teams often build a portfolio of options. The downside is that too many ideas dilutes focus and resources. To manage this tension, they must be willing to let go of bad ideas. Unfortunately, people often find it easier to kill the new (and arguably riskier) ideas and accept the known incremental (and safer) ones faster.

Guidance in this focusing process where choices must be made is crucial. A good understanding of the different types of creativity and a clear view of what the organization and the situation really need helps to make the right choice between the “riskier” and “safer” options. A good task evaluation that gauges what the problem owner or organization REALLY needs is a first indication in which direction to walk and think. Here, too, the CPS process facilitator has an important job to do.

Create support. An innovation will not succeed if an organization’s employees do not support it. The surest way to win their support is to involve them in the thought process. Sharing and thinking of new options together in groups is useful because it can lead to potential solutions of better quality, a sense of cohesion and possible commitment to do something about the problem.

The danger is that the involvement of many people with different perspectives creates chaos and incoherence. It is therefore of utmost importance to steer this thinking process in the right direction by a person who stays out of the content and concentrates on the thinking process: the CPS process facilitator. The process facilitator brings structure to the collaborative thinking process in which advancing insight creates support during the “thinking meeting.”