Creativity and Culture ManagementWritten by Kal Bishop
Many concepts in fields of managing creativity are very much applicable to culture management in general. The same concepts that foster creativity and innovation also maximise human capital potential, increase productivity, reduce costs and maintain competitive advantage etc. Some of many commonalities between culture and creativity management follow. a)A culture of psychological safety and freedom. A culture that limits experience, information and expression and allows relatively few members to contribute to decision-making is not taking advantage of immense pool of available talent. Just as idea-generating sessions are conducted in environments that limit judgement, in order to elicit contribution of all participants, so that philosophy should be extended throughout organisation permanently. b)Motivation is more important than natural ability. This is similar to possessing high intelligence – one must be motivated to apply it and improve it. Human capital is optimised when participants have high intrinsic motivation and i) synergistic extrinsic motivators are present to facilitate task and ii) non-synergistic facilitators are minimised. Further, specific motivators such as i) gap between ideal and real self, ii) degree of enjoyability, iii) degree of challenge, iv) feasibility, v) degree of self-determination, vi) recognition, vii) material reward, viii) time pressures, ix) project numbers and complexity and x) competition versus collaboration etc need to be measured and monitored.
| | Managing Creativity an Oxymoron! Not.Written by Kal Bishop
Interrogated on a beach in Barbados by friends insistent that there was little validity to my speciality, I have felt compelled to come up with most common objections in field of Managing Creativity and Innovation.a) Managing Creativity and Innovation is an oxymoron! When ideas are required, leaders tend to herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct (usually an ineffective) brainstorming session. Implicit in this action is an acceptance that certain techniques and processes can increase problem identification, idea generation and elicitation of tacit knowledge. Structures such as Hero's Journey are accepted as increasing creative output when idea streams (such as in screenwriting) are needed. Product development theory has proven innovation strategies that allow better idea selection, development and commercialisation. Frameworks such as S-curve and idea funnels allow efficient monitoring of ideas through a pipeline and effective go or kill decision-making. b) Creativity cannot be managed because ideas occur out of blue. Ideas are result of mind working on particular problems at various cognitive levels. Though you cannot predict what an idea will be, where it will occur and what form it will take you can increase likelihood of ideas occurring. Further, you can increase number of ideas produced, rarity of those ideas, diversity of those ideas and frequency of their production. c) Creativity is not a process. If you analyse behaviour of people who are used to generating many ideas regularly, you will find that common patterns emerge. There is a definite process that triggers creative activity on multiple cognitive levels, resulting in required insight. The process includes identifying and intensely investigating a problem, forcing production of ideas using creative versus critical thinking and other techniques; seeking stimuli and allowing unconscious mind to take over by engaging in rest and unrelated activities.
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