Sharon has been involved with the Best Practice Club as an Active Learning Day provider for many years. This short article is extracted from her response to a recent request for advice about how to increase creativity.
In the ever-changing environment in which organisations find themselves today, there is a constant pressure to come up with fresh ways of looking at and doing things. As Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
But where do these ideas come from? Creative thinking is not necessarily something you are born with (or not); it is a skill that can be learned and improved with practice. This is not as easy as simply trying out a few creative activities and hoping that this will miraculously change everything. There are a number of different challenges that you face as an organisation in your desire to become more creative:
- Firstly, understanding more about what makes people creative and how you can harness this for business results
- Secondly, creating a new culture where people feel empowered to make new suggestions and to try different things
- Thirdly, managing change as if people mattered - in other words equipping your managers with the skills to effectively manage their teams through change (and the inevitable resistance that comes with this) and potentially helping the employees themselves to learn how to embrace change and uncertainty.
Taking first things first, you need to learn how to enable your employees to think and behave more creatively. The main obstacle to creative thinking is a reluctance to explore new and fresh ways of problem solving. The traditional way of thinking places us in a 'fear of failure' mode, and has us captive to the additional fear of making a mistake. This becomes the walls to our 'box of limitations' or 'comfort zone'.
Start on a small scale and try using some short and simple Creativity Games at the start of meetings to get people thinking more creatively. A really good resource for this is The Big Book of Creativity Games published by McGraw Hill. 
This will not be enough to suddenly make everyone more creative all the time. To achieve this it is really necessary to invest in some training on creative thinking. Ideally this would involve all employees, but could be limited to managers and trainers if budgets are tight.
The purpose of creative thinking training is to re-harness our innate ability and combine it with practical techniques that fit easily into our 'adult world'. However, creativity is not just about one or two individuals attending a course and thinking differently. To make a lasting difference to an organisation, it is necessary to harness the creativity of your entire workforce. You can do this firstly by enhancing delegates' personal creativity and improving their ability to generate ideas, innovate, think and plan. Secondly, you can do this by introducing delegates to a model for implementing the culture and processes to support creativity in your organisation.
In terms of creating a new culture, Gerry Johnson's Cultural Web is a very pragmatic model for both assessing and designing culture - and to identify the gaps you have between the as is and the to be!
In change management terms, it is the engagement of your employees that will ultimately make the difference between success and failure. Change is happening to us all the time, both personally and professionally; it dominates today's business landscape.
Many frameworks have been constructed to help manage and direct change such as total quality management, re-engineering, right sizing and culture change. Few of these frameworks have been an unqualified success. According to Fortune magazine, 50-60% of all restructuring and quality initiatives fail. A key factor in these 'failures' is that the programmes often ignore the 'people' side of change. You may change this or that process or system but until employees change the way they work you cannot fully fulfil your objectives.
Many changes are of our own making, but work changes, very often, are imposed on us; for example restructuring, new procedures, new products. These changes may be introduced with the intention of making the organization more efficient or competitive, or with the aim of increasing the job satisfaction of employees. However, they may not be viewed enthusiastically by those employees.
To create an organisation that truly embraces change and innovation, we believe that you need three key factors:
- Inspirational leadership - to create the vision, enthusiasm and buy-in and to 'model the way' for others to follow.
- Transitional management - to make the links between the big picture and individual roles and to help employees manage their personal transitions.
- Individual buy-in and commitment - the ability of individuals to recognise the potential benefits of a changing environment and to embrace the possibilities of 'uncertainty'.
Many organisations dabble with one or two of these aspects and are all too often disappointed when they do not achieve the results they were hoping for. And after all, can you afford not to make some radical changes. As Charles Darwin said:
"It is not the strongest or most intelligent of species that survive......
...... it's those who can adapt best to change"
