As an aspiring leader and brilliant student of creativity, your friend has come to you in a crisis. The organization that they have been leading for a few years is suffering from huge losses in membership. They describe how the group is facing a “fail-cascade” and will probably completely dissolve soon if some drastic action isn’t taken. When pressed for details, your friend says that they’ve tried all the “traditional” methods of maintaining membership. They’ve put out ads, they’ve re-structured the leadership, and they’ve held in-group meetings to try to figure out the reason for any displeasure. So far these have not been effective. In terms of what this group is, this is up to you. It needs to be a volunteer organization of some sort – some ideas: A sport club, an online guild, a bible club, a local beauty pageant organization, basically anything that meets regularly and needs to have sustained numbers to be able to accomplish their tasks. A music band wouldn’t work because it’s not quite enough members – let’s aim for it having more than 10 people. You can expect a very low level of available physical support – there’s a little bit of money in their club fund, but it’s at most a couple hundred dollars. You do have access to some volunteers though, if you need do something that’s time intensive. The remaining members seem very into it though, so you can count on them for doing things that might be uncomfortable (videos, car washes, the classics: no illegal activity please). Your task is four-fold: Describe your creative process in trying to find a potential solution. Who needs to be involved? Who would be valuable? Where will you pull in the necessary perspectives to get useful data? Brainstorm a series of solutions. Aim to have at least 8 distinct ways it might be solved. Then, rank them on two different scales: On the first scale, describe how “good” you think this idea is. On the second scale, rank them on levels of “ridiculousness” or “silliness” or “childishness” – something to that effect. This isn’t meant to be a measure of how possible or good it is, but rather how fanciful it would be to implement it. For the #1 ranked item on both lists, create a plan that could make it work. It doesn’t have to be extremely long, one or two paragraphs, but it needs to show a framework that is possible within the constraints described above. Look at the overlap between these as you’re working on them. Analyze these plans you’ve just created. First – think about them from your perspective, or that of your friend that asked for your help. How do you feel about them? Are they both effective? Is there one you prefer? Second – Look at these plans again as a member of the group that isn’t you or your friend. Which of these plans seems more interesting? Which might cause you to come join as a new member if you heard about it? This assignment should be about 4-5 pages in length. The brainstorm section should take up about a full page at least though, so it shouldn’t be a massive amount of text to go through. If you’re pulling in outside sources for data or evidence, please cite them as well.
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