Cultivating the creative class
Being creative on demand is damned hard work. It can casue you to overeat or not eat at all. It can churn your stomach in knots and cause you to have sleepless nights.
Still, any creative worth his iPod will tell you that the pay-off is worth the price. It comes in the brainstorming session preferably over a large pizza with everything on it, it gets better still when the idea begins to take shape on paper.
But best yet is when the idea flies, when that tiny nugget of information you had in your head one week or one year before adds significantly to your company's bottom line. The sense of satisfaction is sweeter than any chocolate frosted cake.
That's why fostering creativity in your organisation is critical. Uniqueness of an idea can come from anywhere - the idea, the business logic, the accounting process, the culture.
But what it really boils down to is the people. Being different is the key. Creativity is about seeing things differently.
Little happens in the innovation department when a group of 50-something-year-old males from the same culture and background get together to make a decision about bringing a product to market.
Chances are, however, if you take that group and added a mix of cultures, gender, backgrounds and different ways of thinking you will generate a plethora of ideas and a load of energy.
That's why firms need to hire and depend on those who can come up with unique ideas. The ones who are a little different.
But this is where the trouble starts, because uniqueness and difference are often the preserve of people, who judged against the average corporate citizen, often seem a little strange.
They break the rules. They question norms. They are prepared to take risks, sometimes leaving the organisation, which entraps them to set up organisations of their own.
Does this serve the firm any good? My answer would be an emphatic no! Sameness is a direct route to nowhere. If we are all willing to follow conventions, to think like all the rest, we will see the same things, hear the same things, hire the same people and develop identical products and service.
We will create a sea of normality and drown in it. In 2009, Sameness Inc. is bankrupt. But cultivating the creative types takes a special leader who is willing to see things differently. Firstly, creative work is not automated, and definitely not linear.
It stops and it starts. I remember five years ago at the Ernst & amp;Young Entrepreneur of the Year Conference, one speaker said that one of his developers, after creating and bringing to market an innovative software, would often disappear from the company for weeks on end, virtually unreachable by phone to a remote part of India, the country from which he came.
The speaker expressed his frustration at first until, as he recognised, his developer's weirdness was one stream of his company's wealth.
After a while he thought that instead of working against his talent he'd work with him and proceeded to give him six weeks off after a particularly gruelling period of innovation.
The fact is, if you let creative types make the rules, within limits (you don't want utter confusion), if you allow them time for blue sky thinking, protect them from idea killers and add liberal doses of fun to your hopefully non-cubicle environment - pizza after long meetings work every time - you'll be creating streams of revenues that may allow you to overlook personal idiosyncrasies.
So go ahead and cultivate the creative class. The alternative is nightmarish. A company doomed to produce ideas that everyone else has already seen.
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Creativity cannot flourish in a vacuum of sameness. For me, my creative juices seldom flow during my routine daily tasks but more so during the times I may be having a chat with my husband or friends, reading a book, surfing the internet, designing jewelry, on a travel expedition, during lunch hour dialog or at a party.
Yes! There are the structured meetings for brainstorming that assists the creative process but this process doesn’t stop in the room but feed off different experiences that may seem unrelated but provide inspiration and innovation that adds value to the new plan, project or solution.
I believe people and organisations limit creativity through routine behaviour, fear, limited experience and many other factors. I was able to help create one of the first and most innovative organizational team building programme in 2008, although it was resented in the beginning by staff, at the end of the programme there was increase buy in, appreciation and desire for this idea that broke so many barriers. Now 2009 is here and I have the challenge to push the programme into new directions, to increase the momentum and allow people new opportunities to be innovative, build teams, improve communication and lift organisation morale. This new programme all started because we were willing to take risks, defy the status quo and we were given the opportunity to run with the ideas.
Happy New Year!
Tameika
Laura the example you gave at Stanford is such an excellent one, that our next staff meeting I think I'll adopt it.
There is a new kind of conference meeting called un- conferencing where there is no agenda and no person in front the podium speaking at an audience. Instead there are groups of people sharing knowledge and utilising the same sticky note for the generation of ideas.
I have never seen it at work at a meeting though but I am excited to see how it will work at our staff meeting this Friday. I'll let you know how it goes
Just came across Idea's brainstorming card with rules to govern the process.
Defer judgement
Encourage wild ideas
Build on the ideas of others
Stay focused on topic
One conversation at a time
Be visual
Go for quantity
They also gave us a 4 card deck with a method on each to inspire a great design. (They not only design tools but spaces and concepts).
Be your customer: Ask the client to describe outline, or enact their typical customer's experience since it reveals the client's perception of their customer and provides an informative contrast
to actual customer experiences.
Create affinity diagrams: Cluster design elements according to intuitive relationships such as similarity, dependence. This method is useful to identify connections between issues and reveal innovation opportunities.
Long Range Forecasts: Write up prose scenarios that describe how social and/or technological trends might influence people's behaviour and the use of a product, service or environment. Predicting changes in behaviour, industry or technology can help clients to understand the implications of design decisions.
Cognitive Task Analysis: List and summarise all of a user's sensory inputs, decision points and actions. This is good for understanding users' perceptual, attentional and informational needs and to identify bottlenecks where errors may occur.