Ideas, big and small, are essential to growing a healthy business. The ability to innovate provides a genuine competitive advantage, whether it is ground breaking new products or simple innovations to improve the customer journey or reduce process costs.
With such clear benefits to business I am always amazed by how few organisations invest in growing the creative talents of their people. Maybe the reason is that many people believe that creativity is the preserve of a few gifted artists, musicians and those people who work in the marketing and R&D functions. It is certainly true that the western education system and the average workplace has inhibited the ability to think divergently, to come up with multiple answers to a question, or even interpret the problem in different ways.
When running Creativity workshops, I see this in practice. I ask people to come up with as many uses for a paperclip, or similar object, as they can in 90 seconds. Invariably people stumble to 5 ideas, sometimes 10 but even with more time the ideas just dry up. Research has shown that children under the age of 5 would knock the socks off the average adult.
Watch the funny TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson to find out why this happens.
So, does that mean that the talent of creative thinking is lost forever or can it be rediscovered?
My answer to this starts by exploring some of the common barriers to creativity in the workplace.
Many employees fear putting forward what may be perceived as ‘silly ideas’ but this can be overcome by building more trust and a better understanding that innovation does need a good dose of silliness.
Some employees let ‘imaginary’ rules of what can and can’t be done get in the way of ideas generation. People filter out ideas before they have even been formulated – we can’t afford that, it won’t get management support, we don’t have the time, are common phrases I hear. I know that Virgin Atlantic didn’t let imaginary rules get in the way when nurturing the idea of the ‘drive-thru’ airport check-in. There were more than enough real rules to content with.
Creativity can also be killed in the room by someone (often by the manager) who wants be the smartest kid in the room, critiques too early or simply leaps on the first workable idea at the expense of the creativity than may follow. Ego, rank and sometimes pragmatism needs to be left at the door if creativity is to thrive.
So how do you overcome these barriers, and others? What can you do to stimulate creativity of your people?
In addition to addressing some of the cultural barriers (that’s for a different blog) I have personally found that techniques that introduce a different perspective can quickly stimulate ideas. At Virgin, I was introduced to a technique called ‘Imagine the Future’.
You encourage the team to work in the future, imagining in some detail a time when they have achieved a transformational goal. This can be described as a newspaper article or maybe even an acceptance speech for an industry award. You then get the team to work back from the future to describe what they did to achieve the goal. I have found that working in the future, in a fun, collaborative and engaging way, makes it possible for the team to suspend the usual rules and behaviours that stifle creativity. Without fail teams have generated ideas that have become a real part of their plans simply by imagining the future.
I’d be very interested to learn from readers what techniques they have used to stimulate creative thinking.
Please get in touch if you would like find out how I can help your teams be more creative.