Creative and Innovative Culture, Change Management - Three Easy Tests
Creativity can be defined as challenge identification and idea generation and innovation can be defined as notion choice, development and commercialisation. From this straight forward definition, it is clear that specified cultural characteristics ought to be prevalent if creativity and innovation are to be maximised. And maximisation of these ought to be a priority for senior leaders, as those organisations that take them seriously, tend to be leaders in their field, tend to maintain their leadership position longer and are quicker to bounce back when competitors leap frog.
There are quite a few blocks that prevent expression of complications and hinder concept generation. Some solutions contain:
a) An surroundings of psychological safety and freedom - accepting an individual as unconditioned worth recognising that the individual is capable of making but that their worth is not based on generating understanding empathetically understanding the individual from their point of feeling and view (Vernon, 1970).
b) Tolerance of failure - Accepting that lots of concepts will fail ahead of one worthwhile a single will surface and reach commercialisation recognising that there are positive aspects to failure, such as competency expansion - Blade Runner was initially a commercial failure however Ridley Scott went on to make some pretty productive motion pictures. The Economist (2003) states that 3000 bright tips result in 100 worthwhile projects, which are winnowed down to 4 improvement programmes. And 4 such development programmes are necessary to stand any possibility of getting 1 winner.
Though senior leaders spend lip service to the above, the reality is frequently substantially different. Below are some simple and straight forward tests to gauge how nicely your organisation is performing in practice.
a) Employee interviews. Are interviewees expected to conform to the prevalent norm of not contradicting the interviewer? If they do so, are they less likely to be selected? Interviewees who throw up quite a few concepts and challenge current methodologies at this stage are significantly more probably to be expressive when they get troubles in an organisation and much more likely to bring them to the attention of choice makers. They are also more probably to persuade others to do the similar. Thought leaders are wonderful drivers of modify and prevent complacency - even though as a result it is not unusual to obtain that they trigger friction with senior leaders who for some cause or other may perhaps be resistant to transform. Remember, today's believed leaders can quickly turn into tomorrow's established bureaucracy.
b) Personality conflicts are pretty normal inside organisations. Some theories argue that all interactions on some level are conflict based. But are junior people penalised when they conflict with senior persons? Even if the senior person is in the wrong, do they get their way for the sake of preserving the current order, structure and processes? Is the junior individual made to feel that his or her behaviour wants to be monitored beneath threat of some sort of negative outcome or punishment? This is i) contradictory to an surroundings of psychological safety and freedom and results in suppression, not expression, of situation identification and idea generation and ii) a sturdy indicator that the culture is moving in the wrong direction.
c) Are senior leaders confident enough to leave themselves open to evaluation from all others in an organisation? Status deference has many negatives such as i) higher status individuals tend to dominate the session and decrease the participation of others, ii) consumers allow greater status folks to do all the idea generation, iii) people today location greater value on tips developed by greater status individuals and iv) individuals have a better tendency to enable greater status men and women to get away with negative tips.
This topic is covered in depth in the MBA dissertation on Managing Creativity & Innovation, which can be purchased (along with a Creativity and Innovation DIY Audit, Really good Thought Generator Software and Energy Point Presentation) from . You can also obtain a typical, free newsletter by entering your email address at this webpage.
Kal Bishop, MBA
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