Leadership and Creativity: the time is right

There is a growing consensus about the importance of creativity in our workplaces. As your organisation's local and global competitiveness is challenged, it is harder to sustain yourself by differentiating on cost or short-term quality branding. It becomes more important to produce high-quality thinking that can generate a stream of products, services and processes.

Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas; innovation is the transformation of these ideas into products, services, business processes or new business models that provide benefits to interested people. Using these definitions, it's possible to be creative without being innovative. But, to be innovative, we must be creative first.

Creative thinking is typically needed where challenges are non-routine, and have no obvious path to solution; novel, at least as far as your organisation is concerned; ambiguous, with gaps in information and the meaning of information.

Senior leaders can't do this by themselves. How will you engage the talents and discretionary efforts of your people?

Leadership and the creative knot:

Uncertainty and anxiety go hand in hand with the need for creativity. Under these physiological pressures, people will often revert to habitual practices - we're more likely to avoid risk and produce ideas that build on what we already do, yielding incremental, safe changes. That may be OK, but is it what your organisation needs?

In practice, people need to contain the anxiety that goes with producing creative ideas, sufficient to continue exploring for novelty and usefulness. There are no off-the-shelf guarantees to make this happen, but we've worked with many teams to balance this tension. We develop your leaders and their teams to make the most from your diverse talents, build trust and mutual support, and galvanise efforts towards clear business goals.

Keep informed

My blog is called Nutshell. It focuses

on the research and practice

of creativity and innovation.

Bluegreen Learning helps you make the most of your people's talents.

The Innovation Toolkit course

You can have creativity without innovation, but not innovation without creativity. If you need to produce new and useful ideas for product, service and process improvement, this world class programme can help you.

In this course you will learn:

15 powerful tools for generating and selecting new ideas
8 guidelines for effective thinking
4 main components of creative problem solving
Insight into your personal style around solving problems and managing change
Practical suggestions for leading and managing change
World-class best practices for idea generation and idea focusing



We typically run this in-house, but it is also available as an open programme. Contact us to find out more: rob@bluegreenlearning.com