Creativity & Innovation in your Organization

IN THIS ARTICLE:

• The importance of fostering creativity and innovation in your workplace.
• How organizational environment and structure impacts innovation.
• Creating an innovative organization is hard work and requires you to develop new mindsets.

Leading innovation in your workplace

It’s great to hear success stories from people who’ve attended my workshops.  It’s always exciting to discover how they put their learning into action.

A few days after I ran a creativity workshop in London, a participant emailed me.  She was a television producer.

Unfortunately, she didn’t write to share a success story.  She was writing to tell me why she couldn’t do creativity.

Her boss crushed her spirit.

First, she thanked me.  She said the workshop had really fired her up.  She had started using some of my techniques.

However, she was having little success sharing these techniques with her team.

“What I didn’t tell you on the day of your creativity workshop,” she started, “Was that creativity was an uphill struggle before I even attended your workshop.”

“Some friends at [withheld] Company did your workshop a few months ago.  I signed up for the workshop because they raved about it and are now producing some great work.”

“But I had the hardest time convincing my manager that I should do it.  I kept asking him and he eventually said yes – I think to keep me off his back.”

“After your workshop,” she went on, “I was brimming with enthusiasm and suggested we use some of the techniques to improve our team’s creativity.”

“But my boss looked me in the eye and said, “That creativity stuff is all a waste of time.  Don’t bore me with it.”

“I could have cried,” she wrote.  “How can I ever be creative when my organization seems set against it?”

Environment and the creative spirit

This lady was in a tough position.  She had a creative spirit and wanted to take risks.  But both her working environment and boss made it impossible.

Unfortunately a lot of people are stuck in organizations that stifle innovation.

Sometimes it’s deliberate.  More often though, it’s caused by things like history and tradition, poor leadership, empire building or lack of knowledge.

Many of these organizations have highly rigid policies and hierarchal structures.  In some, the leadership fails to effectively model innovative attitudes.

Other organizations pay lip service to the importance of innovation.  Their leaders herald innovation as a priority but do nothing to stimulate it.

The sad thing about this is most organizations have people who want to innovate.  These are people who will, in the long run, make their bosses look good and make their shareholders smile.

Innovative workplace crucial in flatter world

Creating an environment that encourages innovation and creativity is crucial if you are to have a creative organization.  Your leaders must also model the attitudes that will encourage it.

I’ve met a lot of people in my creativity workshops stuck in workplaces that stifle innovation.

And when I’ve discussed this issue with leaders, they often express desperation because they want their organizations to nurture innovation.  But they just don’t know how.

Today, more than ever before, innovation is a crucial to your organization’s future.

The world is flattening.  And competition from India, China and other developing nations is challenging countries in North America and Europe more and more.

The new economies are easily winning on production costs and labor.  This makes innovation the key skill that European and North American companies must develop.  And not just in these regions.

If your organization lacks an innovative spirit, you must develop it.  It’s your responsibility regardless of whether you lead three people or thirty thousand.

Nurturing innovation is hard work

Nurturing innovation is more than just scheduling a brainstorm every month to develop with new products or services.

Nurturing innovation is about reviewing everything you do every day.  How you do it.  When.  And why.

Creating an innovative organization requires you to develop new mindsets.  And it demands that you model that new mindset in your policies, decisions and behavior.

It’s not an easy process.  But facing the challenge now may be easier than fixing a bigger problem later on.

Recreating an existing organization to become innovative, as well as starting one from scratch is very hard work.

Easy concepts in textbooks are not always easy realities when you build them.