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?
The twist:
Under the pressure of producing novel solutions, with added high expectations from stakeholders, we may revert to habitual practices. We''re more likely to avoid risk, instead producing ideas that build on what we already do, yielding incremental, and safe changes, but probably not what the 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 make the most from diverse talents, encourage mutual support, and galvanising 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 in groups, 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
A proven process to guide your creativity and innovation efforts
Practical suggestions for leading and managing change
World-class best practices for idea generation and idea focusing
It is run in Bristol, UK on 24th-25th April 2012. Contact us to find out more: rob@bluegreenlearning.com