WHY CREATIVE MANAGEMENT?

Innovate or evaporate - Japanese business professor Hiro Takeuchi says that "creativity is not an issue in Japan...it is the only issue!" A recent survey of 500 top CEOs in America asked them what their organizations needed to survive in the 21st Century. Top answer was "to practice creativity and innovation." However, only 6% of them believed they were tackling this effectively! Embedding creativity to drive innovation is clearly not a quick fix.
As Bill Gates said about Microsoft, "our only factory asset is our imagination."
Business guru Gary Hamel is adamant that, "radical innovation is the competitive advantage for the new millennium."

Creativity is a complex (sometimes very simple) and versatile concept. It is always present everywhere and manifests itself in many different ways in our daily lives. Creativity, like photography, is all about the art of "seeing." In other words, creativity is looking at the same situation as everyone else, but seeing something different.

I have selected Barriers to Creativity (idea) and Excursion (tool) to demonstrate my understanding of these concepts by applying the learning diary approach.

Barriers to Creativity (idea)

The best possible way to come out with an outstanding idea/solution is to come up with many ideas. But generating many ideas is limited by a number of “barriers”. Our Life has always been the battleground between old ideas (views, culture etc) and new ideas. Our thinking is driven by brain patterns -- beliefs, values, assumptions, stereotypes, emotions, culture, level of understanding, short-term and long-term memory, and entrenched views. These patterns or mindsets are invisible but the behaviors and resultant performance they generate impact our life. Our subconscious mind likes closure. When faced with an incomplete picture, it works to complete the mental image by inferring the missing information. Our mind works the same way on an unsolved problem or challenge; it loves to dive right in and get the job done. Our subconscious mind churns through all of this material and forges new connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information. The subconscious then sends serves ideas to the conscious mind, usually as vague feelings or intuitions. While the average person may ignore or overlook these hunches, the creative person knows that he or she must record all ideas, no matter how wild or impractical - and evaluate them later.

The creative person realizes that the mind is an inexhaustible storehouse, but he must constantly augment its storehouse of ideas, thoughts and wisdom with new material from which to forge new ideas and "connections."

Don't be satisfied with looking at your current challenge from your usual, habitual point of view. Take a mental walk around your challenge. Get focus in and examine each aspect of it. Then broaden your mental focus and consider your challenge in the context of other trends or forces, as well as similar situations others may have faced.

Personal Barriers to Creativity:

Some of the personal barriers to creativity are beliefs, values, assumptions, stereotypes, emotions, culture, level of understanding, short-term and long-term memory, and entrenched views. These personal barriers give birth to fear of trying, fear of failure, fear of sharing knowledge, fear of security, fear of risk, fear of change, fear of being laughed at, fear of making mistakes, fear of appearing stupid by proposing something that is not possible, fear of showing ignorance, fear of showing personal thoughts, fear that personal ideas are so easy to copy they can not be shared with colleagues, fear of competition, satisfaction/being content with, jealousy of colleagues, never done before, don't know how to do, holding on to past successes etc.

Our mindset “filters” make us very selective about what we “see” and restrict available “idea space.” We need to consciously increase “idea space” to increase our versatility and performance. We must “unlearn” the mindsets, which act as barriers, so we can exploit and profit from the potential of our individual and collective creativity. Changing our mind can literally change our world -- and our organization’s level of performance.

A great way to generate original ideas for our business is to look for weird combinations. Most new ideas are really combinations of other ideas. Nearly every new idea is a synthesis of other ideas. So a great way to generate ideas is to force combinational possibilities. One can generate ideas based on the existing ideas or knowledge (solutions that others have already had some success with) or by thinking in totally new directions (usually high risk involved).

What I did?

During the experiment I made a good contribution to argument expansion however, in the end, my ideas appeared to have converged out as I was different in thinking and perceiving things from the rest of the group. I gave a lot of importance to innovation & creativity by thinking out of the box.

My results of 3 personality tests (Kirton's Adapter - Innovator continuum, Learning Style Inventory and Myers Briggs) assessed me as high on innovation, a connector, and a Journalist. The results of these tests justifies why I was different from the rest of the group and this gave me an invaluable experience to treasure.

What I thought?

Most of the time my actions were the consequence of my past experiences. I always let my mindset interfere with my actions. After the creative management experience I know the importance of seeing and perceiving things in a different way. During my early part of my experience I created many new ideas but didn’t have a proper mechanisms to record them as they are generated. Short-term memory made these ideas slip out of my mental grasp just as quickly as I took to create them.

How my mental map changed?

I have realized the importance of devoting time for thinking, reflecting, connecting, acting and creative problem solving. It deepens our inner conscious that often gets overlooked during the busy-ness of our everyday lives. It allows us to consider our opportunities and challenges, goals and dreams. It frees us from needless worry and allows us to focus on more constructive pursuits. It's been said that successful people have as many problems as anyone else. What gives them such tremendous leverage over their lives is a simple, systematic method for analyzing and solving their problems.

My mental map changed when I Started to ask myself incisive, well thought-out, open-ended questions -, questions that cannot be answered with "yes" or "no." Open-ended questions can yield a treasure trove of valuable information and insights. This helped me to cultivate an "insight outlook" -- consider information, trends and other data from multiple perspectives, and try to identify the inferences, underlying trends or connections they may contain.


How will I behave differently in the future?

I will start asking myself many questions to generate new ideas, respect the minds of others, and give credit to others.
I will observe intensely, paying careful attention to my thinking and capturing/recording the new ideas as they are generated.
I will design a system to improve my ideas and build new bigger ideas from small and old ideas
I will anticipate achievement.
I will start treating problems as challenges to better myself.
I will adopt a positive attitude.
I will not be cynical about change.
I will be prepared for rejection as more radical my ideas the more likely it is that people will feel uncomfortable with it

Excursion:

When you need to loosen your mindsets associated with an issue then take your mind on a journey away from the problem to find freshness, new ideas and new perspective. It involves searching beyond the traditional scope/parameters of the problem to get more innovative ideas. This will help us to think out of the box. Excursions can take many forms. A simple one is to try imagining how different characters might solve the problem. Use the new perspectives to generate new thinking.

The excursion technique is based on many years of observations of what people do naturally, though not necessarily consciously, to generate new ideas. Though there's no guarantee that you'll get new ideas each time you use it, most people find that it does significantly increase the odds, especially with practice.

The technique attempts to relax our strong internal censoring device and helps people take mental vacations temporarily from the problem.

An excursion has three basic steps. They are:

Temporarily put the problem out of mind.
Think of an irrelevant object/material and generate the properties/attributes.
Improvise a novel idea by comparing the object’s attributes to the original problem at hand.

When to use it

The excursion technique is useful:
When you want to diverge the idea finding stage
When you want more speculative ideas
When you have 'run dry' and need some additional stimulus
When you are up against a roadblock or need a breakthrough

What I did?

As part of excursion I selected a key bunch with 7 different keys. After returning to the room I placed the keys on the drawing paper and started to record all the attributes of the keys. Some of the properties that I recorded were difference in size, color, shape, material, and texture, small but opens bigger avenues, simple, portable, easily misplaced, versatile etc.

What I thought?

In the beginning I thought it was a bad choice of tool for diverging phase of the idea finding stage. As I started to record my thoughts and insights, patterns started to emerge.
Following each of these patterns/leads/experiences and digging them as far as possible, I started to create new ideas, which sounded very ridiculous to me, but I didn’t let my mindset to censure any ideas at this stage. The way to come up with one great idea is to generate many of them

How my mental map changed?
And when we do so, our perspective changes. Solutions that may have been hidden from us are now suddenly obvious. Obstacles to our progress, seen in a new light, are often much smaller than they appeared to be. And barriers that once seemed insurmountable often evaporate under this rigorous scrutiny.

My mental map changed when I started to ask the following thought-provoking questions from different perspectives:

How is this situation similar to others I have faced before?
How would someone else solve this problem?
What experts could I call upon to help me solve this problem?
What are some excellent sources of information on this topic or related areas?
If this problem involves another person, how does he or she view this situation?

How will I behave differently in the future?

I realized that a simple solution could be the answer for a very complex problem only when we dig deep and think out of the box.

My mind is now open to all ideas - big and small

I will take a mental "walk" around my problem. Imagine hanging it from a hook in the center of the room and then walking slowly around it, viewing it from all sides.

Conclusion:

My Creative Management Experience helped me to differentiate between "Focusing on problems" and "Focusing on solutions". This is really simple and interesting. Very often we get carried away in problem solving. Keep it simple and move on.

There's a hidden danger in waiting for brilliant flashes of insight or for a so-called "big idea" - a completely novel idea for project, product or service. By focusing too much on big ideas, we can easily become blinded from seeing other merely "good" but still valuable solutions. While not as flashy or elegant as "big ideas," these less awe-inspiring insights often represent very workable options or solutions, or could be used as stepping-stones to other great ideas.

When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens wouldn't work at zero gravity. In order to solve this problem, they hired Andersen Consulting (Accenture today). It took them one decade and 12 million dollars. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, under water, on practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C.
The Russians used a pencil!!!

- Adapa Lalith Raghav