‘Innovation’ and ‘creativity’ shouldn’t be confined to the wall in reception
It was one of those rare moments of candour you get when dealing with senior management. “I know that our mission statement talks about innovation and creativity,” an executive once hesitantly told me. “But we really don’t want people thinking outside the box. We just want to make the box cheaper.”
Translation? She wasn’t really interested in innovation and creativity. She just wanted to keep costs down. What this conversation demonstrated to me was that for many individuals and organizations there is no clear understanding about what innovation and creativity mean in a business sense and there is a fear attached to new ideas.
In 2002 the Innovation Network did an interesting survey. They gathered up the mission statements from the Fortune 500 companies and found 88 per cent had either the word “innovation” or “creativity” in them. They then did a survey of those organizations that had those phrases as part of their mission statements and found less than five per cent actually had programs in place to make innovation or creativity part of the culture. So why do organizations think it is important enough to put on the wall in reception, but not on the competency model in human resources?
The problem most organizations have in translating innovation and creativity from paper to practice is there is no real understanding about what the terms really mean. A few years ago, I was sitting on a panel with a consultant for a large training organization. The topic was creativity and this organization was launching a new training product that was designed to tie creativity to the bottom line.
It created a very complex program that was designed to ensure “bad ideas weren’t expressed.”
I asked them how they separate a good idea from a bad idea.
“Bad ideas,” the consultant said, “just annoy people.” Well, we would not want any ideas that might annoy people.
“Besides, our creativity is tied into the bottom line,” the consultant continued. “People come up with an idea that gets approval. They get all the resources they need and then they measure the result, put it on their review and they are held responsible for it. Consistently what we have found is that there is a positive bottom-line effect.”
If my job was on the line for an idea I created, and I got all of the resources I needed for its completion, you could bet money I would make sure that it at least appeared to be successful. Leave it to consultants to create an anti-creativity creativity program where people feel limited to only express some arbitrary standard of “good” versus “annoying” ideas. In this situation, people will limit the flow of ideas to ensure they are not labeled as “silly.”
Everybody is creative
Companies expect employees to be creative and innovative. After all, that’s why they were hired in the first place. But that’s also why organizations have so much difficulty implementing training programs for innovation and creativity. Since everybody is creative, how does that get put into an organizational development strategy? Training simply will not make a worker creative or innovative. To get creativity and innovation flowing, the onus is on employers to create a work environment that encourages this behaviour.
Creativity can’t be confined to a room
If workers are told their ideas “annoy a lot of people,” they may not want to share them, even if it means helping the organization avoid a costly mistake. Likewise, in a fun environment where people freely share ideas, one idea bounces off another and creates a lot of options.
Creativity can’t be confined to one room. The environment has to be created where ideas flow as events happen in real time. It’s unrealistic to put somebody in a room who is being told daily to simply follow procedures and not to think and then say “Voila. Be creative now.”
So how can an organization implement a creativity and innovation program? There are a number of steps they can take.
•Don’t shoot down ideas: This is moving from the “yah but” to the “yes and” culture. If ideas are continually shot down with, “Yes, but here is why it won’t work,” people will stop sharing them.
•Help people understand the “box”: Employees have to understand the box in order to go outside of it. The more they understand why things are done the way they are, the more innovative they can be. Knowledge transfer and sharing are big topics for organizations as the workplace ages. By creating an environment of innovation, people are encouraged to share because they understand that, instead of it being a threat to their position, it actually makes their position stronger because they also receive ideas and information they can use.
•Help people to understand the time and place for innovation: What scares many organizations is that the constant flow of ideas means nothing ever gets done. Comments like, “We don’t believe in creativity for creativity’s sake,” and, “If it isn’t broke, why fix it?” have merit. Like all competencies, there is a time and a place for it. Not many passengers want airline pilots to be creative and innovative on take off and landing. But if the steward sees something wrong, they want her to share what is happening with the pilot and help create a solution so the plane can land safely.
Michael Rosenberg is the author of The Flexible Thinker®: A Guide to Creative Wealth and co-author of The Flexible Thinker® Guide to Extreme Career Performance. He can be reached at
(905) 846-5455, [email protected] or visit www.flexiblethinker.com.
Translation? She wasn’t really interested in innovation and creativity. She just wanted to keep costs down. What this conversation demonstrated to me was that for many individuals and organizations there is no clear understanding about what innovation and creativity mean in a business sense and there is a fear attached to new ideas.
In 2002 the Innovation Network did an interesting survey. They gathered up the mission statements from the Fortune 500 companies and found 88 per cent had either the word “innovation” or “creativity” in them. They then did a survey of those organizations that had those phrases as part of their mission statements and found less than five per cent actually had programs in place to make innovation or creativity part of the culture. So why do organizations think it is important enough to put on the wall in reception, but not on the competency model in human resources?
The problem most organizations have in translating innovation and creativity from paper to practice is there is no real understanding about what the terms really mean. A few years ago, I was sitting on a panel with a consultant for a large training organization. The topic was creativity and this organization was launching a new training product that was designed to tie creativity to the bottom line.
It created a very complex program that was designed to ensure “bad ideas weren’t expressed.”
I asked them how they separate a good idea from a bad idea.
“Bad ideas,” the consultant said, “just annoy people.” Well, we would not want any ideas that might annoy people.
“Besides, our creativity is tied into the bottom line,” the consultant continued. “People come up with an idea that gets approval. They get all the resources they need and then they measure the result, put it on their review and they are held responsible for it. Consistently what we have found is that there is a positive bottom-line effect.”
If my job was on the line for an idea I created, and I got all of the resources I needed for its completion, you could bet money I would make sure that it at least appeared to be successful. Leave it to consultants to create an anti-creativity creativity program where people feel limited to only express some arbitrary standard of “good” versus “annoying” ideas. In this situation, people will limit the flow of ideas to ensure they are not labeled as “silly.”
Everybody is creative
Companies expect employees to be creative and innovative. After all, that’s why they were hired in the first place. But that’s also why organizations have so much difficulty implementing training programs for innovation and creativity. Since everybody is creative, how does that get put into an organizational development strategy? Training simply will not make a worker creative or innovative. To get creativity and innovation flowing, the onus is on employers to create a work environment that encourages this behaviour.
Creativity can’t be confined to a room
If workers are told their ideas “annoy a lot of people,” they may not want to share them, even if it means helping the organization avoid a costly mistake. Likewise, in a fun environment where people freely share ideas, one idea bounces off another and creates a lot of options.
Creativity can’t be confined to one room. The environment has to be created where ideas flow as events happen in real time. It’s unrealistic to put somebody in a room who is being told daily to simply follow procedures and not to think and then say “Voila. Be creative now.”
So how can an organization implement a creativity and innovation program? There are a number of steps they can take.
•Don’t shoot down ideas: This is moving from the “yah but” to the “yes and” culture. If ideas are continually shot down with, “Yes, but here is why it won’t work,” people will stop sharing them.
•Help people understand the “box”: Employees have to understand the box in order to go outside of it. The more they understand why things are done the way they are, the more innovative they can be. Knowledge transfer and sharing are big topics for organizations as the workplace ages. By creating an environment of innovation, people are encouraged to share because they understand that, instead of it being a threat to their position, it actually makes their position stronger because they also receive ideas and information they can use.
•Help people to understand the time and place for innovation: What scares many organizations is that the constant flow of ideas means nothing ever gets done. Comments like, “We don’t believe in creativity for creativity’s sake,” and, “If it isn’t broke, why fix it?” have merit. Like all competencies, there is a time and a place for it. Not many passengers want airline pilots to be creative and innovative on take off and landing. But if the steward sees something wrong, they want her to share what is happening with the pilot and help create a solution so the plane can land safely.
Michael Rosenberg is the author of The Flexible Thinker®: A Guide to Creative Wealth and co-author of The Flexible Thinker® Guide to Extreme Career Performance. He can be reached at
(905) 846-5455, [email protected] or visit www.flexiblethinker.com.
