Are you losing out on Creativity in your Organisation?

In organisations we emphasize the corporate culture and compliance but do we do this at the expense of creativity? When things don’t go as planned or people don’t follow conventions, we tend to erect more fences to stop these deviations because we see them as ‘outside the norm’ and as an irritation or distraction. It delays us from getting on with things’. So why don’t we view these events differently? If an employee breaks protocol to meet the urgent or unusual needs of a customer, the instinct is to reprimand but how about we say ‘I think you’ve found a more efficient way to do things’?

Here are a couple of illustrative stories:

In 1928 a Scottish bacteriologist returned from his holidays to find that one of his petri dishes had a strange mould growing in it. Organisational and clinical procedure would have told him to sterlise the petri dish but Fleming thought differently and discovered penicillin. In the early 1940s a Swiss engineer went for a walk with his dog in the Jura Mountains. When he came home his trousers and the dog’s fur contained tiny seed burrs. If he’d been at work he would have ‘tidied himself up’ because of dress policy but instead he examined them and developed Velcro from their structure

Almost half of all inventions start with this open-ended process and often the result of ideas or discoveries that people had while working on something else. What they have in common is people who are curious and want to understand and find out why. 

When you ask people what is hampering creativity and innovation in their organisations often the answer from senior managers is that people don’t show any initiative. Those lower down resent being micromanaged and not encouraged by managers to try out their own ideas or challenge the established way of doing things. Maybe middle managers block new ideas, but the real problem lies with the culture

How can organisations and their managers become more receptive, more open to challenging ideas? How can we create a climate that allows risk taking and innovation?

1. Listen more and talk less. If we spend time listening to people’s objections and proposals we are likely to discover key issues and find useful ideas.
2. Recognise risk takers. If someone comes up with a good idea that is then implemented we need to praise and recognise them to encourage others
3. Reward failure. If someone makes an honest attempt to try something new and different and fails then do not punish or blame them. Recognise their effort and see what lessons can be learnt. Nothing crushes innovation like a fear of failure.
4. Ask for suggestions. Throw down a challenge, ask for and encourage a free flow of ideas. Don’t make judgements during the ideas generation phase, evaluate and implement later.
5. Set goals for innovation. Define metrics and include them in your balanced scorecard – the number of ideas generated, number of prototypes in trial, proportion of revenue from new products.
6. Invest in learning and development. Help people develop how to generate, evaluate and implement ideas.
7. Network and borrow. Observe other organisations and copy best practice with a deliberate policy for sourcing innovations from outside as well as inside.

AZTech training offers a Management and Leadership Training Course: Leadership, Creativity & Peak Performance that will allow you to understand the best strategies and techniques to adopt in various workplace situations.