Schwager, Viviane
(2010)
The role of play in enhancing decision-making in innovation creativity environments.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This thesis investigates Innovation Creativity Environments (ICEs) located within the London School of Economics by looking at events taking place within these specific spaces. ICEs are gaining popularity within organisations and academic institutions as places to foster creativity for decision-making. Much has been written about these types of spaces in organisational and business contexts, but academic research is virtually non-existent. This research sets out to document two main objectives. The first objective is to describe and narrate what actually happens in Innovation Creativity Environments before, during and after the event taking into account crew facilitation and participant perspectives. The empirical focus of the thesis is on a series events mounted annually in these environments on "Project Dreams and Reality," with the aim to support MSc students in the Institute of Social Psychology, LSE to prepare for their dissertations and future careers. The thesis provides, as its first objective, an in-depth narration of in the documents what actually happened within ICEs. The second objective is to understand how these environments function and provide Group Decision Authoring and Communication Support (GDACS) that facilitate creative decision-making. Through interviews, observations and participation the research identifies two main pathways in which play supports the decision-making processes with ICE. First, play enables participants establish a background-of-safety, a concept coined by Sandler and Sandler (1978), is a psychoanalytical cognitive model that identifies safety as a feeling quality within the ego and motored by the ego, which is usually taken for granted. The ego tries to maximize safety experience, rather than avoid anxiety, allowing students to risk being creative. Secondly, play nurtures the decision-hedgehog (Humphreys and Jones 2006) which positions decision-making through the construction of narratives making the rhizome that constitutes the body of the hedgehog with the fundamental aim of enriching contextual knowledge and creativity for decision-making within Innovative Creativity Environments.
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