Creativity in business – nice or necessity
Being a creative thinker gives a person many advantages over his or her colleagues. Allowing the passing on of that creative thinking to the rest of the business however, creates an advantage over its [the business] competitors – sometimes enough to give it an edge.
The culture within a business concerned with creativity needs to be very open. It is no longer the domain of those upper managers.
To clarify: Empowering your employees by giving them opportunities to be creative, or going further by creating expectations and training on it, does not make them decision makers. You shouldn’t panic as a manager if your workforce is paying attention to things you’re confident wont work. As a manager you’re there to ensure they don’t go off too far.
Someone with the right talents or training will have a valuable set of skills to use when working on an idea.
Give your people the power to negotiate its acceptance, by you the manager and the rest of the workforce.
Con-di-vergence
When looking at an idea, there are usually two main themes of thinking. These two different ways of looking at things are: Convergent Thinking and Divergent Thinking.
Convergence:
Involves judging and aims to eliminate all options but one.
Divergence:
Involves moving away from current beliefs and options
So why do you need to know about this?
When being creative, especially within a group, these two types of thinking affect the how productive you are. It’s important to understand their impact so that we can personally ensure we are offering what is most needed in a group at any one time.
Convergent Thinking
This type of thinking (which is the most natural) is used to find a single thought or idea and to challenge all others to beat it. Any other ideas that do not measure up are discarded.
When you have a series of good, well thought out ideas, and you’re not sure which one to choose - this process is good. However, when you are in the middle of being creative, it’s no good shooting down every single idea, because it’s not amazing the very second it’s thought of.
Divergent Thinking
You will find that there are many ideas you will create that wont sound too practical when you first think of them. If you give them room to blossom however, they can mature in to brilliant and intelligent ideas. You can increase the amount of ideas you have by changing the way you look at old ideas, or by looking at your new ideas from different angles.
So what about the ones that don’t make it? Isn’t it a waste of time working on ideas that don’t mature?
The benefit of working on an idea, even if you know it’s not going to work, or you’re unsure whether it will, are:
Most of all, you’ll have fun, which is important (humour is a right brain activity, as is your creativity).
Ideas beget ideas (every time you throw ideas around, you think of even more).
Most of all, you get experience at playing with ideas.
A very important creative skill is to be able to take something you don’t like, and make it into something you do like. This is the essence of changing things for the better; there is always a starting point. The same goes for ideas, just because you don’t like the idea, that doesn’t mean you’ll never like any version of the idea.
Imagine a ‘discussion’ between three people Nimisha, Craig and Darren, on the subject of increasing empathy:
Nimisha: ‘How about giving training on empathy skills?’
Craig: ‘We did empathy ages ago and it didn’t work’.
Darren: ‘They’ll only end up being ‘too’ empathetic, a that scares the customers away’.
Nimisha: ‘What about an incentive scheme for showing empathy?’
Craig: ‘That will only de-motivate the staff that aren’t empathetic’.
Darren: ‘What they need, is not more training but a kick up the backside; they should know how to be empathetic anyway’.
How long will Nimisha continue to offer ideas? Convergent thinking, which involves judging and aims to eliminate all options but one, drives out divergent thinking. The two have to be kept separate. Divergent thinking needs a safe environment, free from judging, where ideas can feed off one another.
The first and most important lesson for creative thinking is that the two types of thinking have to be kept separate. You cannot have only good ideas, but if you have enough ideas there may be some good ones amongst them.
So, is convergent thinking always bad?
Certainly not, there are many times when convergent thinking helps. Convergent thinking only really becomes negative and is a draw back when one gets stuck, and only uses this style. Being aware of its time and place is the most important thing, so as to ensure you don’t sour your productivity.
When is convergent thinking good?
A lawyer is a good example of someone who would use convergent thinking in a productive manor. Lawyers will often think of all the arguments for and against something systematically in an attempt to anticipate potential pitfalls in their clients’ position.
You too can spend time systematically attempting to find potential problems with the ideas your working on; as long as you are aware that that is what you are doing. In most situations however, you should try to only interject convergent thinking in to a small percentage of your working time.
Inside Out - Motivation the right way round
People are motivated from the inside out; providing external gratification like giving them DVD players etc will help someone that is currently motivated stay that way. But if someone feels undervalued at their core, then no amount of trinkets and prizes will do. Only by helping that person overcome their state can we move on to making them happy. Allowing them the rush of recieving material goods will do now good for them, or your team in the long run.
People are people; they are always people. This is not to say that they are all the same. Just that it doesn’t matter where they are, what they are doing, or how much they are being paid. They are still people, and should be treated that way.
You can have different opinions, you can have different methods, and you can have different priorities. But as long as you all genuinely share the same common and specific goals, you are a team.
People are not mushrooms. Mushrooms grow well if you keep them in the dark and feed them hourse manure, people on the other hand do not.
My responce to a CEO’s blog, for a company I used to work for. The reply to it, was written personally and was posstive, though not included here. I’ve removed the names for obvious reasons.
———————————————————————————
Over the past three years I’ve noticed, as have many others, that [the company] is struggling to ‘keep with the times’.
Where I expected to join a company that leads its industry, that leads its people and that leads with its best foot forward – I found myself working for a company that sits complacently with other companies in the industry, is ignorant to ‘individual circumstance’ and is by no mean pushing the fold.
For the most part the people within the company are creative, intelligent and motivated. In contrast, [the company] proper is passive and appeaseable.
Creative and driven individuals don’t mince their words, nor do the companies that choose to foster them. Innovative companies, such as Google et al, are uncompromisingly creative. They don’t pull punches; they throw whatever they’ve got and live with the results. They know the score – hard work needs hard play. You don’t win by following suit, a runner knows the risks are higher the harder you train, but the dice is still thrown and the gamble taken.
I love the fact that we are starting to let new things in, but there is a bigger step to take. As [a colleuge] suggested, and I shall paraphrase with an aphorism of my own – it’s not about letting new technologies in the door, it’s about ‘taking the bull by the horns’ and making it work for us.
The very same thing can be said for talent. We’re very good at finding talent, at carrot and stick recruitment; but where we really need to work is talent realisation. We need to stop making people do thing because they are capable of doing them, and start getting people do to things because it’s what drives them – it’s what they derive passion from.
In today’s innovative climate, it isn’t good enough to be satisfied because your balance sheet shows good numbers. Neither your profit and loss, nor your shareholders can be the top priority in pointing to the direction of progress. They are there to keep us afloat, but they are by no means our power. I keep thinking that instead of “Revenue Engine” we should be talking about “Innovation Engine”. We give permission to innovate, but we do not drive it.
The situations that are stifling innovation within [the company] are not due to the attitudes of our managers towards our ideas – far from it, for the most part our ideas themselves are taken on and a dialogue is opened. What the problem is, is fear. If we’re not scared of our boss, then our boss is scare of theirs – or our boss’ boss is scared of those senior to them. Somewhere along the line, the voice of innovation goes quiet. Someone somewhere quits or gives up trying, not because it’s easier to roll over, but because they feel that’s the only option.
From vibrant “wow” and excitable “cool”, we step ever closer to “well the problem is” and “I like it, but…”
We’re starting on the way to doing things right; we have the Innovation Challenge which, we are informed, was a great success. Hopefully this will help begin the ‘fostering of innovation’. What companies need now, are not big, national or global innovation projects. By doing so, you turn innovation upside down. Innovation should not start at the top, nor should it start as a “make a big impact” idea. It should be in the very fibre of the company, and the big idea should flow along the same channels as the tiny ones. An individual on the lowest level should be just as comfortable in saying, “we need a new risk model” as “we need a new toaster in the staff kitchen”.
As a big company, we are drawn in by what the others are doing. We create a habit of making one size fits all projects they try to capture our employee audience and entice them into helping build the company further. However, if we take a leaf from the book that tells us about our clients, we know that it will not work that way. We need to focus on small groups and engage individuals personally.
We see this in examples in every area of life. A restaurant doesn’t just create one big pie for it’s customers – it provides specially made meals, and the good places will customise it to your whim. When you buy a computer, you no longer get one of whatever is available; you get exactly what you want. We can see the different in thanking everyone using generalisations and compare that to individual praise. Saying, “thanks for the hard work” is ineffective if contrasted with, “thank you for developing a new scripting system, everyone loves it and it’s increased sales x, y and z”.
By all means, have a capture all project working its way through the company, but it will not drive the company far. What we need is not hulking great achievements every year, or every quarter; we need daily innovation. Every day, a light must go on in the mind of at least one of the thousands of people we have.
Be individual, be specific – it’s a hard formula to get right, but it’s the winning one.
It’s not surprising that as an insurance company we deal with risk differently to other companies like Google and Apple. Our working lives are centred on taking as little risk as possible and mitigating those we must take.
The shear mass of [the company] as a business protects us from change and lets us cope as we take time to pick up on the innovation of other more willing companies. How long can that last? “Innovate or die” really must become the terminology we use. As aggressive and brass as it sounds, we can only go so far when we try to use nice, flowery and comforting words. Saying, “lets work as a team” doesn’t do what it used to. This phrase used to motivated people, but now, as it has been used so often, it does little more than placate. It’s too general, and too overused a phase.
I personally have decided to leave [the company]. Not because I’m angry with they way I’ve been treated, though I have had my moments of frustration. Not because I don’t feel adequately compensated for my work, or I think that my skills and strengths are in someway suppressed as a sacrifice for the power trips of others. These are all things that I have been concerned with in my tenure here, but they are not the cause of my departure.
The single most pertinent cause of my resignation is that I am a highly creative person. In stark disparity, and an opposite of how it should be, I am in fact leaving because I’m creative, instead of staying because I am so.
[the company] has drained my motivation to the point where I am not concerned with achievement, where I am complacent with being mediocre and am no longer shocked by the lack of meritocracy. This is something that I am not willing to put up with, and cannot let me self continue doing. It has been a long hard three months trying to balance my lack of motivation, my search for new opportunities and my personal need to commit to the job at hand. I no longer make a difference, and that very fact makes a difference in me.
I wish I had someone to blame, just for the sake of convenience. Yet none of the people I work with should shoulder it, not my boss or any of my colleagues. It is the culture of [the company], with its inflexible processes and its “not your job to think” attitude towards the lower echelon that I belong to. It’s [the company]’s willingness to pay £500 per day for a consultant with the gift of the gab, or a friend upon high, yet readiness to support the laziness of systems that do not, and cannot, identify personal strength and seem operated to try and play down the achievements of the masses.
Web 2.0 is a revolution in the attitudes of those who influence the Internet, lets all hope it’ll be a revolution for [the comapny] too.
