Wednesday, April 30, 2014

How to Build a Creative Workplace and Workforce?

CREATIVITY has to become the philosophy, and part of DNA in an organization. 

Today’s digital workforce is multigenerational, multicultural and multitasking; today’s digital workplace is always on, always connected, you can work anytime and anywhere, with more seamlessly cross-functional collaboration and cross-geographic interaction. But more strategically, how to build a creative working environment to inspire innovation and encourage creative problem-solving in business? What are the best practices, or next practices to reinvent the digital way of work, and what are the roadblocks on the way?


Leadership supports and develops creativity throughout the organization. This begins with leading by example. It includes establishing a climate that encourages creativity, and it also means investing the time and resources to develop domain skills in people and effective collaboration in groups. Without proper leadership, creativity is sporadic rather than integrated into the thinking and activities of the organization. Defining an innovation leader is a way to coordinate the innovation effort by leading the process him/herself.  

Empower people to be creative: Helping people recognize when they are being creative shows them what you're expecting from them when you ask them to be "creative." A group that puts together a social function is being creative, a programmer that finds a way around a roadblock is creative; a leader who spends just a few minutes contemplating a fringe solution is creative, etc. “Business Creativity" must be something to do with the customers as digital is the age of the customer, to create an interactive environment with customers, so that you can reverse engineer from customer to a creative product.

To be willing to fail: Some of the most cutting-edge companies that hire brilliant and creative employees find that they're afraid to leave their comfort zone in order to innovate and act on new ideas. The company leaders have to push them to risk - encouraging them to leave their safety nets. Willingness to fail is an important factor which must be fostered by top managers. Either they achieve that failure is tolerated, and even promoted within the company culture.

Creativity has to be in the DNA of a business. Creative thinking or possible the more abstract, CREATIVITY, has to become the philosophy of an organization, innovation is part of the corporate culture. After collecting poor to terrible, good to great to fantastic stories of creative thinking or creativity being truly included, it needs to be truly spread throughout organizations via the following actions: 
-SUPPORTED
-PROMOTED
-ENCOURAGED
-EDUCATED
-APPLIED
-DEVELOPED
-RECOGNIZED
-REWARDED

The creative workplace is based on a triangle with three vertices: culture, method, and people. 
-Culture must be fostered from directors downwards, otherwise, no real sponsorship takes place. 
-The method is required for good performance, facilitating creative teams, and providing proper creativity tools. 
-People must enthusiastically participate, getting proper empowerment, and noticing that their initiatives do arrive at the end. 

Overcome obstacles: There are numerous roadblocks on the innovation journey, here are a few:
-Fear of judgment is one of the biggest obstacles to the creative process, so If the group has worked well together before, you must establish an environment that encourages listening and welcomes tangents with the understanding of eventual focus. If it's a new group, storyboarding will help the shy ones express themselves more freely
Convergence –Divergence: Many ideas do not turn into innovations and that is the 'fault' of careless convergence which leads to inadequate execution.

-Not enough resources 
-Bad timing 
-missing technology 
-missing markets 
-poor handling by supervisors, team leaders, managers, bosses, CEOs 
-lack of support 
-resistance 
-the killing of idea nature of too many people 
etc.

The most important factor in business creativity is "clearing a space for it to grow." Like building a building, first, you need to prepare the ground so a solid foundation can be poured. When the environment and space are cleaned and prepared completely.... the creative efforts of many can flourish." -Ken Stevens

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