Industry News
Innovation and Creativity in Organisational Development: Speaker Tina Catling
Posted: 20/07/10Creative ideas often arise from confusion or from “free” or even disorganised environments. However, there needs to be a balance between an emphasis on critical activities and those which encourage greater creativity, and this is largely determined by “culture”. A critically important issue to consider also is that people work from problems to solutions at vastly different rates: the creative capacity of an organisation is therefore highly dependent on the ability of employees to engage with and empathise with each other.
An excellent case study is provided by a well known media organisation, which employs a large number of creative minds. They love cartoons, they love to create, and they produce results. However, the Chief Executive decided that the company was running short of ideas so he circulated an email, requesting that the company wanted ideas and that every employee should make a contribution. Anyone with a knowledge of the organisation might have guessed that such an initiative might have been successful: however, it was a spectacular failure.
The idea firstly created confusion. This led to random and incoherent sets of ideas, and insufficiently good material which fell into the “too difficult to sort” pile, and within a very short space of time the creativity of the organisation was registering a net negative; in other words, on the creativity scale it was worse that it was before the initiative, with employees thinking that it was “just another ill thought out initiative”.
This leads to the serious issue of what actually is innovation? A snapshot view of Price waterhouseCoopers and Virgin would yield vastly different results. For this reason, any initiative involving innovation and creativity has to be thought through, be sufficiently large scale, and be “calibrated”, so that its effectiveness can be measured and so that it can be aborted before damage is done. A large number of corporates have a “lazy”, “risk averse” and “barren” culture, and this has to be changed before any serious innovation initiative can be undertaken.
However a programme is delivered, it must make people feel comfortable with each other before moving forward: shock tactics are not appropriate. However shock can work if it is fun, viz use of plasticine, lego and even rubber ducks.
Unstructured techniques such as brainstorming are divisive and rarely as effective as more structured approaches. However, some companies such as Arup have developed a structured approached to innovation and problem solving. Topics considered include Shape, Strategy, Goals and Hopes/Fears. Main features are:
• Every challenge should be worth savings of at least £500,000. Anything less will not be given serious attention
• They should have the effect of changing strategy and direction
• There should be management support in place to effect the change
• There should be support from the Board, and ideally feature as one of the top 12 areas identified as needing change
• There should be a start – middle - end
• There should be an innovation champion
• Mood “Hoovers” and “Abbots” (Ah buts) should be excluded if they can not change their thinking!
• Avoid derailing the process by trying to quantify the unquantifiable, such as individuals’ self-esteem and confidence. A large capacity for innovation will encourage people to find their own level and encourage the maximum contribution to creativity these attributes will assume lesser importance..
Toyota use elements of the above but then ask “What would happen next?” and use the range of scenarios to make predictions as to the likelihood of a success or a failure. It can be applied to marketing or to engineering problems.
Two final thoughts on creativity:
• The process of driving culture change from outside to encourage creativity is only the equivalent of catalysis. Creativity must come from within
• Organisations need to have large enough projects to make the process worthwhile. Small projects will have insufficient impact on the organisation.