The Secret to Fresh Ideas: Have You Made Space for Them?

Do you feel like the year has well and truly taken off and your old friend ‘busyness’ has re-appeared?

Are you wistfully looking back on those few hours, days or weeks when you had space to think creatively and marvel at what you came up with because you gave your mind the freedom and permission to wander?

The space I created enabled me to develop the content for a set of Lead with Confidence cards aligned with the book I wrote (pre-orders open soon). You may have developed a concept for a new service or worked out how to overcome a longstanding challenge.

It’s the benefit we get from blocking time in our calendars with only a rough idea of what we’d like to explore and giving ourselves permission to go down rabbit holes and leap from idea to idea to create something new or different.

However, it’s too easy to get caught up in daily activities and the next most urgent task and forget how productive and impactful we can be when we carve out non-specific space.

Unfortunately, that’s not always practical. So, how will you ensure that you enjoy the benefits of creativity throughout the year rather than as an experience that only happens a few times a year?

Before you answer, you may want to remember that the benefits of creativity in complex change are nothing new. IBM’s 2010 Global Chief Executive Officer Study interviewed 1,541 CEOs, general managers, and senior public sector leaders from 60 countries and 33 industries, including 22 Healthcare Payer organisations.

The study revealed that CEOs viewed creative thinking as the most crucial leadership quality in an increasingly volatile and complex world, and that was before we experienced the COVID-19 pandemic.

Creativity was identified as crucial for experimentation, making significant business model changes, taking calculated risks, and continuously innovating leadership and communication approaches.

We must remember our minds are like gardens. That garden will eventually become dull if we always tend to the same plants without planting new seeds or giving them space to grow. However, you can grow a vibrant and diverse garden by creating space for new ideas and nurturing them. Similarly, as leaders, we need to make space for creative thinking to encourage innovation and growth in our organisations.

Should creating regular, unspecified white space for creativity in your calendar feel impractical, you could add one or more of the following into how you lead through change:

• Add the question “What else can we try?” to the repertoire of questions you use regularly.
• Be more conscious of how you personally respond to left-field ideas and suggestions. Are you shutting people down or showing appreciation for their in-the-moment creativity – even if you don’t think the idea is feasible?
• Give yourself and your team permission to deviate from what you typically do when pondering a problem. Go to different places and use different experiences as inspiration.
• Instead of always focusing on the most sensible and obvious solution, challenge yourself and your team to develop three different variants.

If regularly carving out a few hours for your team is viable, create a series of challenges where some constraints are imposed and others are removed. You could ask the team to imagine a crucial element is suddenly unavailable, and what was illegal is now okay, then challenge them to find ten solutions within a specified time. Encourage them to think about feasibility after the process so they keep the possibilities open.

Feeling nervous about what you’ll get? Set some essential guardrails around cost and safety and leave them to it – including where and how they create the space to tackle the challenge.

At a Harvard Business School colloquium on the importance of creativity in business, Intuit cofounder Scott Cook asked, “If there is a bottleneck in organizational creativity, might it be at the top of the bottle?”

I’ll leave you to reflect on whether you’re the cork in the champagne bottle or the one shaking it in celebration.

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