Here's how you can infuse creativity to foster innovation in your organization.

Leave your echo chamber. Diversity is a big word. Everyone wants to see it done differently. While some organizations are more diverse than others, there is a very straightforward way to add diversity to your creative process. Even in the most diverse organizations, people tend to stick to their little pack. Enlarge the circle of people you talk with when engaging in creativity. Include new perspectives from people in your organization that you typically don’t think about when coming up with new ideas. By doing that, you are creating a more inclusive environment while increasing your chances of spontaneously improving your own ideas. You will become more approachable and might find others starting to share their ideas with you too.

Infusing creativity to foster innovation in an organization involves creating an environment that encourages experimentation and diverse thinking. For example, implementing regular brainstorming sessions and idea-sharing platforms can spark new concepts. Encouraging cross-departmental collaboration allows different perspectives to merge, leading to unique solutions. Additionally, providing time and resources for employees to explore passion projects can lead to unexpected innovations

Infusing creativity to foster innovation in your organization begins with cultivating a culture that embraces diverse perspectives and ideas. Encourage brainstorming sessions where everyone feels empowered to contribute freely. Foster interdisciplinary collaboration to combine different skill sets and viewpoints. Implement design thinking methodologies to empathize with users and redefine challenges. Create a supportive environment that values experimentation and learning from failures. Recognize and celebrate innovative ideas to inspire continued creativity. By fostering a creative and inclusive culture, you can drive meaningful innovation that propels your organization forward in a competitive landscape.

Incorporating a Rotating Devil's Advocate system into your operational planning is a powerful way to embrace diverse perspectives and leverage creative abrasion through autonomy. By assigning this role to different team members, empowering them to challenge assumptions, and creating a safe space for constructive debate, you can foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Reflecting on the process and iterating based on diverse feedback ensures that the system remains effective and evolves to meet the needs of the team. This structured approach not only leads to more creative and effective operational strategies but also helps to develop critical thinking and communication skills among team members.

Strategy often leads to making decisions about what not to do. But leaving too much off the table, especially when it comes to creativity, can lead to stagnation and hinder innovation. Your team has to allow for some built in risk as part of the ongoing journey towards operational success. This is true because we live in a changing environment. It is likely not in our favor to stay the same. This means change, and change is inherently risky. And since risk is simply an uncertainty around the end result, the process of risk taking is ultimately a price paid to uncover a new truth. An organization trying to better approximate positive change is bound to be more self aware and have greater good impact over time.

We used something we called "DevOps Days", where we took 1 week to log the greatest manual challenges faced by tech teams, and then sought to automate them, removing human toil. Understanding engineers would have to iterate before releasing an acceptable solution, I allowed them autonomy to collaborate and use collective creativity in staging. The production roll-outs were still gated by peer reviews and change management principles to protect production and customers from experiencing impacts. This ultimately culminated in a full task automation jobs suite called "Jupiter", which allowed disparate teams to leverage the same code snippets in their culture of innovation.

One effective way to measure and activate curiosity within your organization is by introducing a KPI called the Net Curiosity Score (NCS). The NCS is designed to gauge the level of curiosity among employees and how actively they seek out new information, technologies, and methodologies. This score can be derived from reviewing your internal industry training platforms for courses personnel have freely explored, surveys and feedback mechanisms that assess employees' engagement in learning activities, their willingness to explore new ideas, and their participation in innovation-related initiatives. Team stand ups are another way to log data points.

“If we are going to fail, we better fail fast.” Creative processes require a playground. You should set rules. But within the rules, everything is fair game. The notion of having only one way to do something right has no place in the minds of creative thinkers. Instead, approach problems with openness, and have the willingness to try different paths at achieving your team’s goals. Interpersonal dynamics have a profound impact on flexibility. Talk to people you work with if you feel you want them to understand your process better. This is true especially if you are feeling blocked or overwhelmed by too much structure. Explain the tradeoff and let them know that with a little more space to create you will be able to deliver big results.

Innovation is doing out of the box. System orientation is having an SOP for all activities in the Organisation including manufacturing processes, people processes, procurement processes, sales and marketing processes, etc so on and so forth. In unstructured Organisations the innovations are easier as there are no set boundaries. In structured Organisations where the system orientation is strong, we need a separate approach for encouraging innovation. We need to create a process for innovating and going out of box. Precisely there is an approach in Business Excellence Frameworks for the same. It is the deployment, monitoring and reviews which are more important than defining the approach