A Why A How and A What about Creativity and especially Gamification

WHY WE SHOULD TAKE CARE ABOUT CREATIVITY:

In a recent Insead Blog Assoc. Professor for Organizational Development @Ella Miron-Spektor & team shares her insights "Why Some Employees Improve Their Creativity and Others Don ′t and How our beliefs about creativity explain our ability to improve and sustain it over time". With her co-authors she found out "that when given the opportunity and encouragement, even veteran [ … ] workers can improve their creativity". Further the article highlights that "Organizations worldwide strive to promote creativity, but these efforts are hard to sustain over time". Firms that encourage employees to propose new and useful solutions may soon realize that after an initial boost in creativity, employees narrowly focus on familiar heuristics – proven ideas that worked in the past – instead of exploring new approaches. Further she outlines two types of employees:

1. the learning oriented employees believe that their skills and abilities can be built with effort’, they learn faster from their experiences and create more novel and useful ideas;
2. the performance oriented employees seek to demonstrate their creativity to others, they might appear more productive at the beginning of an innovation process but later in the process they appear less creative.

 I would like to triangulate this research insights with George Land ′s finding about two kind of thinking: DIVERGENT THINKING (Imagination, generating new possibilities, Accelerator) vs. CONVERGENT THINKING (making a judgement, testing, criticizing, evaluating). Kids lose creativity on their path′ to adults because they are taught to use both divergent and convergent thinking at the same time - whilst unlearning divergent thinking for the benefit of convergent thinking - the familiar heuristics, as Ella Miron-Spektor calls it in her Blog. But we keep the capability for divergent thinking: at night in our dreams our full divergent thinking, our full imagination is active and unlimited until we wake up and our filters of convergent thinking are booted, suppressing divergent thinking.

Let me couple the aspect of DIVERGENT THINKING with Ella Miron-Spektor ′s idea of LEARNING ORIENTED employees being more open for new ideas and less in judging about them; and the aspect CONVERGENT THINKING seems to match well with the PERFORMANCE ORIENTED employees who might unconsciously suppress part of their creative potential with the voice of justice that only allows familiar, heuristic frames.

 And did you recognize that the World Economic Forum in their The Future of Jobs Report 2020  phrased the “Top 10 Skills of Tomorrow” with the 5th skill CREATIVITY, ORIGINALITY AND INITIATIVE?!

HOW WE MIGHT BUILD AND SUSTAIN CREATIVITY IN ORGANIZATIONAL EFFORTS TO INNOVATE

From the research mentioned above I perceive two ways most relevant:

A) Staff the right mindset & talent in a good mix in the right innovation stage:  Ella & team suggests to find and pick creative workers in the following way: "Instead of considering only the previous output of employees, the search should also be for an employee with a learning orientation who can move towards different ideas, take risks, learn faster from their own mistakes and innovate". So it’s the look for the mindset ′learning orientation′ rather than ′performance orientation′ ( f.e. number of creative output in the past) , that might be a good filter when selecting people for an innovation initiative. That does not mean the performance oriented employees should be excluded, its rather that HR when selecting participants of an innovation initiative should widen their perspective and include more of the learning oriented employees. This reminds me on Tom Kelley ′s book `The Ten Faces of Innovation`, subtitle: `strategies for heightening creativity′! Adding to the twofold category of learning vs. performance orientation or mindset, Tom Kelley has identified 10 personas, 10 facets relating to the roles in innovation like the anthropologist, the experimenter, the hurdler, the caregiver, the storyteller and others. And Tom Kelley talks about the devil′s advocate, who ′may never go away, but on a good day, the ten personas can keep him in his place or tell him to go to hell′. The devil ′s advocate might be the archetype of a convergent thinker. In my experience we also need this 11th persona as nobody could better challenge a solution to be prototyped. However it might be useful to staff the devil ′s advocate consciously only in later stage after a divergent and emerging ideation process which is dedicated to convergence. And – btw – it can be a nice little aspect of gamification to give a creative ideator the play card and role of the devil ′s advocate when selecting an idea or solution with the most potential impact. 

B) Uncage divergent thinking and the full imaginative power of the employees: George Land found out that only 2% of adults are considered creative in their jobs, on their pathways to adults their skill for divergent thinking has been suppressed. That does not mean it does not exist anymore. As highlighted earlier in this articles we access divergent thinking at least at nights in our dreams. Means there is something to reactivate! But how? I would like to highlight three ways:

1) Ella & team states in their recent post: ′… with the right managerial approach, even veteran workers in their fifties and sixties can improve their creativity. By removing the barriers to new ideas and building the workers’ confidence in their own creativity, the firm motivated them to learn from the feedback they received about their ideas and improved the quality of their solutions.

2) Last week I came across a great managerial approach that Decathlon (thanks again @Charlie Felgate for having shared) applies as part of their global Vision journey: they allow and ask their employees to dream and to write down their dreams. 1115 stories were written, 125 are published as a Dream Book :′The Dream Book is a great representation of what Decathlon teammates want the world to be and leave insights as to how Decathlon can help turn these dreams into reality". I personally find this a great idea: Allow employees to dream and capture their dreams!

3) Apply gamification! In Q1 2021 https://www.agilesprints.space hosted three Meetup events each highlighting different facets of “Gamification”. I would like to share a few key findings:

@Jasmin Karatas, founder of Myndset gave a great introduction around the three cornerstones of Gamification: Emotions & Analogies, Science & Technology, Psychology & Habits. She highlighted a key problem when applying gamification: participants in innovation initiatives usually come with different mindset, cultural background, different expertise and skills. With these backgrounds misunderstanding might occur through different interpretation of symbols used in innovation processes. She suggests to put gamification on levels of emotion, design interventions in innovation initiatives addressing emotions because what we feel with our senses as emotions are sameish independently of our whatever backgrounds participants might have. With her startup Myndset Jasmin provides an approach that can easily be adopted. And she suggests when designing gamification not only to address the ′me′but rather put the emphasis on the ′we′experience to increase the transformative power of gamification.

@Dorothee Kaiser, Leadership Coach and owner of https://www.dorotheekaiser.com/ a while ago discovered The Bigger Game methodology and started to bring it over from the US to Europe. Reminiscent of a simple tic-tac-toe board, the Bigger Game was designed for individual and team coaching from the premise that life itself is a game and that you can start to ?play big“ from any perspective and starting point. The game board helps to get quickly into deeper conversations about one ′s own compelling purpose, needs and sets the next steps to realize one ′s own ?Bigger Game“. In my perception all participants of the MeetUp found this concept quite easy to adopt given lots of people had played tic-tac-toe before in their life so it’s something with a low entry barrier. And it can be applied addressing both the ′ME` and the `WE`.

 @Lidor Wyssocky, founder of SEEMPLI and shaper of C.OS, the CREATIVITY OPERATING SYSTEM provides a full framework to explain, target and analyze interventions aiming to stimulate and leverage creativity. It’s a model that really enthuses me and I would like to encourage all readers of this article to explore Lidor ′s well thought through model directly from here: https://creativityos.com/model/ . I would like to point out only one thing: Lidor positions PLAY as one of the seven key functions of C.OS consciously in the middle of his model which I cannot more than absolute agree to: PLAY propels all the other functions and is the central function of creativity! 

This week – from April 15th to April 21 – in 92 countries the WORLD CREATIVITY & INNOVATION WEEK https://wciw.org/ is celebrated! Many people have joined and joins lots of events and might become stimulated towards more creativity. 

As Ella & team highlight in their INSEAD-blog: Creativity isn’t limited to fashion designers or scientists. And George Land roved in his research: humans are born creative! And again Ella & team write: We found it on the shop floor. People who weren’t necessarily trained to express themselves were given an outlet to contribute differently.

In this spirit let me finally provide the WHAT of this article: Lets have the courage to unfold our creative skills to find creative solutions for the smaller challenges in our Me-worlds and for the bigger challenges of the WE-world.