Bengt
Järrehult, the KM Director for Swedish paper & packaging company
Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget, has come up with a model for creativity
that synthesizes some of the more analytical approaches with some more
right-brain approaches like those in Creativity Inc, by Jeff Mauzy & Richard Harriman, and Presence, the book by Senge et al that I recently reviewed.
Creativity Inc outlines creativity practices
that entail learning new competencies, establishing a facilitating
environment, and offering creativity programs. The keys to creativity,
its authors say, are intrinsic motivation, curiosity, making and
breaking connections, and honest idea evaluation.
Bengt explains his cycle, diagrammed above, as follows:
- Draw Inspiration: You are challenged and/or inspired by something.
- Exercise Personal Courage: The
healthy tension between curiosity (opportunity) and fear (risk), when
appropriately encouraged and reinforced by healthy sense of
self-esteem, drives you to explore the opportunities.
- Break Connections:
You break the existing connections in your synapses to free your mind
(using TRIZ, lateral thinking, meditation and other techniques) from
established, limiting patterns.
- Open Yourself: You
stay in limbo, i.e. with a completely open mind, and draw on input from
outside sources, especially those that intersect and synthesize
multiple disciplines, and add your own internal sensory, integrative
and inductive inputs.
- Create New Connections:
You draw on a balance of intuition, emotional intelligence and rational
intellect to choose and make new and better connections to convert
ideas into opportunities. These opportunities then drive the innovation
process.
- Feel the Reward: The
creative process is its own intrinsic reward, a much stronger motivator
for more creative effort than externally-offered rewards. The joy you
receive from the creative process strengthens your self-value and
self-esteem and provokes even more creativity.
Not coincidentally, there is a lot of the 'suspending' and 'letting go' elements of the Presence model in Bengt's model. This is a personal creative process. Now let's put it together with the organizational creative and innovation process we developed for AHA!:
So, to reiterate Bengt's personal creativity cycle, we, as individuals, (1)
draw inspiration, (2) exercise personal courage, (3) break connections,
(4) open ourselves to input from without and within, (5) draw on
intuition, emotional intelligence and rational intellect to create new
connections, and (6) feel the reward -- the joy that this creative process gives us (outer circles of this chart).
Creative organizations invite us to apply this creative process to organizational creative and innovative tasks. In organizational creative work, we collectively
(a) learn, (b) listen/observe, (c) explore, (d) understand, (e)
organize, (f) imagine, (g) reach out, and (h) brainstorm (leftmost 8 boxes of the inner circle of this chart). In organizational innovation work, we collectively (i) canvass the 'crowd' for confirmation that
our ideas meet a genuine need, (j) design, (k) experiment, (l)
question/challenge, and (m) realize the idea into a successful offering (rightmost 5 boxes of inner circle of this chart). All six elements of individual creativity in Bengt's model are applied in all 13 aspects of the organizational creative and innovation process.
These are both cycles,
and ideas and actions pass through their intersections and give them
momentum dynamically, much as electrons are exchanged in chemical
reactions. For example, you might be reading about a new type of
plastic that dissolves inertly in water, and later about the problems
with sorting and recycling of packaging materials (individual
creativity cycle step 4). You connect the two learnings together (step
5), and get excited about the possibilities (step 6). You are inspired
(step 1) to invent a packaging material that can safely be washed down
the sink. You overcome the fear of being thought foolish for such a
radical idea, the fear that someone has probably already patented it,
the fear that nothing plastic can really ever be harmless to the
environment (step 2), and are propelled by your courage to start
thinking boldly about the possible applications of such a technology in
all kinds of packaging (step 3).
At any point in this personal
cycle, you may be drawn into, or create, an organizational group that
can explore this idea and do what needs to be done to bring it to
fruition. It might start with learning from a business colleague more
about plastics, and sharing what you know so far (step a), or a casual
brainstorming with trusted colleagues over lunch (step h). Someone in
the organization may hear about your exploration and authorize a group
to explore it (step b), or to design a prototype (step j & k). The
personal creative cycle can thus intersect with and be propelled by the
organizational creative and innovation cycle at almost any point, and
vice versa.
Some of the articles I have been reading lately (notably this one
by innovation guru Michael Schrage suggest that there may be three more
steps in the innovation cycle between (i) canvass and (j) design:
- champion
-- do whatever needs to be done to inform and persuade people in the
organization that the idea makes sense, and overcome resistance to it
- obtain sponsorship -- find the person or people in the organization needed to get the project approved, and persuade them of its value
- obtain resources
-- identify and get approval for the time of various people in the
organization, the money and other resources needed to implement the idea
That
would increase to 16 the number of steps in the group/organizational
cycle. I welcome comments from readers on this revision to our model,
and how to integrate it with Bengt's in a graphic way that is not
overwhelming to understand.
Why is there so little
innovation in most organizations today, when there is so much creative
talent and so many ideas and so much information floating around? My
hypothesis:
Organizations rarely invite
people to apply their personal creativity to organizational challenges,
so the available ideas and talent are largely unused and eventually dry
up. This is because most organizations (a) are not set up to tap
this talent, (b) don't really trust most of their employees to be able
to apply their creative abilities and imagination in a productive,
effective way, and (c) are averse to true innovation, as Christensen explains,
because their intense focus on customers discourages them from doing
anything different from what has satisfied customers to date -- i.e.
what they're already doing today.
Organizations are not
stupid. They have achieved success by effectively meeting customers'
needs. They are not motivated to change what they're doing until
something averse happens -- dropping revenues due to a competitor's
disruptive innovation or a dramatic change in the economy, buying
criteria or demographics. Too often, by the time this happens it is too
late.
Successful organizations should be anticipating such
averse events and bringing either sustaining innovations or disruptive
innovations of their own to preempt such events. They should be putting
in place an environment that encourages their employees and others (including customers)
to apply their personal creative skills to help in that effort. And
they should trust their employees and customers to be a vital force in
the organization's innovation efforts, and put in place programs to
demonstrate that trust and tap that creative talent.
Failure to
do so represents not only a squandered opportunity and a waste of
talent, but also guarantees that most of your employees will be bored,
disengaged and disinterested in the organization's success beyond their
own personal interest, and likewise guarantees a largely indifferent
and unloyal customer base. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
