Offices Ripe For Creative Thinking

Such discussions are gaining ground, and the thrust of the talk is that while creativity is not new to human kind, it has often occurred as surprise occurrences of an endeavour. That now needs to change, right from the way we are instructed in schools. There is a need for deliberate and mass elevation of creativity, and hence innovation, to the frontline of business enterprises. Organisations must be keener on creativity as the attribute to look out for in employees, and to consciously cultivate its growth within work environments. When principal knowledge management specialist and head of Knowledge Management at the Asian Development Bank, Olivier Serrat, sat down to write Harnessing Creativity And Innovation in the Workplace in September last year, he said similar things.

He stated: “Some hold that the capacity to harness intellectual and social capital, and to convert that into novel and appropriate things has become the critical organisational requirement of the age. The shift to knowledge economies has been abrupt and there is a flurry of interest in creativity and innovation in the workplace. Innovation is considered, quite simply, an imperative for organisational survival. And so it will be for employee survival. Think creativity, think innovation, and as an employee, your place could be secure.

But this, according to Ojiambo, shouldn’t mean that workers and professionals, particularly those who imagine they aren’t easily creative, should start getting alarmed and worry about sending themselves into spiritual consultations with deity to generate ingenious ideas.

Exciting ideas
“There is no rocket science involved,” he says. You don’t have to be in a trance to get ideas from some supernatural intelligence. Creativity comes from existing ideas,” he argues. This implies that being creative and innovative doesn’t have to involve re-inventing the wheel, but simply modifying it to suit a new purpose. Ojiambo recently spoke on the topic with the aim to inspire his audiences to perceive creativity and innovation not as a club of a select group of people, but as an act that every individual is inherently capable of achieving. The main problem, he says, has been that most of us have been exposed to academic upbringing that has concentrated on developing more of logical thinking through textbook instructions, which tends to suppress intuitive and open ended perception of ideas.

Incidentally, it is the latter that promotes creativity, which organisations are now being encouraged to foster by going easy on rules, policies and bureaucracies and giving more room to liberal thinking. One of the first people to signal the need for organisations to take this route, was former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan. While giving a speech at University of Connecticut in USA in 1997, he said: “The growth of the conceptual component of output has brought with it accelerating demands for workers who are equipped, not simply with technical know-how, but with the ability to create, analyse, and transform information and to interact effectively with others.”

In his book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, who had wide interactions with the US labour market as an aide to a former labour secretary, explains the whole science behind it, by pointing out, as Ojiambo has often done in his talks, that human qualities associated with the left side of the brain, which are things to do with logic and reasoning as promoted by our academic system, must be effectively supported by functions on the right side of the brain, where creative thinking lies.

Flawed systems
Unfortunately, most education systems limit room for the creative side of the brain to be exercised. The argument by Ojiambo and other people who have written about the subject, is that leaders of organisations must now create environments that reignite creativity and support innovation. First, a definition to link creativity and innovation would be useful. According to Serrat, creativity is the mental process of “generating ideas, concepts and associations.” Innovation is the successful exploitation of those new ideas.

“It is the profitable outcome of the creative process, which involves generating and applying in a specific context, products, services, procedures and processes that are desirable and viable,” he writes. But creativity, continues Serrat, is not a function to be simply switched on and off at will. Neither does it just happen. It flourishes in organisations that support open ideas. Such organisations are those that have allowed employees to think beyond the confines of rules, policies and bureaucracies if they need to, in their search for new ideas. To promote creativity, it is necessary for organisations to encourage all their employees, and not only the elite group of managers, to understand competitors, to analyse the entire industry and to go ahead and study unrelated industries and interact with them. Great ideas, he argues, frequently come from wild and broad exposure. For example, when Robert Lutz joined General Motors as vice president in 2001, he drew inspiration for his vehicle design creations from arts and entertainment businesses.

What he ultimately came up with by the time he was leaving GM early this year, had changed the fortunes of the company that had suffered reduced sales. A system that gives employees wide exposure and then allows them to throw in new ideas, might be the starting point to rolling out an environment that will ultimately cultivate a culture of innovation.

Source:  http://www.monitor.co.ug/Magazines/Jobs%20&%20Career/-/689848/1019628/-/4r7bkrz/-/