Okay, so… You’ve got the culture; you’ve got the great people, the ideas and the motivation – but wait!

NO time!

The company I work for is a smart, creative and progressive company that copes with the ebbs and flows of creative industries. We have product development meetings and regularly get together to solve problems – or to generally figure out how to do things just that little bit better.

Each of us is an expert of some sort or another; some more-so than others, of course. We’re each open minded, happy with our jobs and get a thrill out of overcoming the challenges we face every other day.

Skills are distributed, the team works together and we get on with our boss’, and their ideas. We’re not restricted in our work – well, other than the client’s brief that is.

So what’s the problem?

What about time, money, workload even?

Sometimes a team can have all the right ingredients, but lack the available resources to move forward. Or, at least at a pace it’s capable of.

We’ve been a little slow recently as far as PD is concerned; luckily we’ve got loads of work coming in.

What’s even better than that is that even though we don’t have the time just now, we’ve not lost sight of our goal – to change for the better.

Sometimes you’ll hear from business leaders – we just don’t have the time or the people to do things differently. Just make sure that’s true, and it’s not an idle excuse.

Not having the time is no excuse to give up, to ignore it or procrastinate; for the truly innovative work to the bone and at least keep ahead of the pack.

Obvious if you ask me.

Changing, for the most part, is a tiny step by tiny step kind of an affair. We just get on with things, cross our fingers, and hope that we’re going in the right direction.

That’s what we do as people.

Businesses aren’t people though – apart from the odd witty phrase that suggests otherwise, we have no reason to be mistaken about that fact.

Were we to continue with the metaphor however, we can see could say this:

If you’re going somewhere new, and you want to make a good impression, do you:

· Dress up?

· Make an effort?

· Buy a new pair of shoes?

If you’re meeting someone important, do you:

· Comb your hair?

· Sit up straight?

· Brush the lint off your trousers and the dandruff off your shoulder?

At an interview, do you?

· Care about first impression?

· Do you care about presentation?

· Or make an effort to speak clearly, and intelligibly?

Now, let’s get back to business. How many businesses do you know, that aren’t trying to go somewhere new? Or that aren’t trying to make a good impression?

How many customers do you know that aren’t important to the businesses that crave them?

How many businesses do you know that aren’t constantly involved in a game of first impressions?

In fact, how many do you know that aren’t doing a combination of all the above?

What about yours?

Change is an obvious thing in our personal lives, and we are quite often struck by surprises – even highly successful and intelligent people. This obviousness leads to it being an oft ignored subject; bar the odd stint of buying self-help books that go along with our new year’s de-resolutions, of course.

In business however, can you afford to ignore change? Sure, you might miss a few beats every so often, but it is your job – to ride the change, or predict it and to react to it, or at least to the fact that you may have missed it.

It’s not about trying to understand worldviews in their entirety. It is about, finding those world views that mean something to you, that are your worldviews, or the views of the people in whose world you want to be successful in. Find those micro-worldviews and tap in to them, and most importantly – when the world spins, revolve with it.

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.