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Innovation Agenda by Brian Clegg Creativity is a word that you can't avoid. Whether listening to an arts program on the radio or a keynote speech at a business conference, you will hear 'creativity' and 'innovation' bandied about. Everyone agrees that creativity is a good thing - which is just as well. When everything is stable, you can afford to carry on the way you always have, but today's roller-coaster business world requires a very different response. Creativity isn't a nice-to-have, it's a survival skill. It's worrying, then, that a survey of major US companies taken in the mid 1990s found that 80 percent of firms said that innovation was important, but only four percent thought they did it well. The picture is much the same in the UK. Unfortunately, all too often creativity is seen as something arty and tenuous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Creativity can be approached in a professional, business-like way. There are well-established techniques which regularly and reliably generate ideas and solve problems. And it is entirely practical to put together an agenda for developing a culture of creativity. A starting point for the innovation agenda is finding out where your company is now. How many of your products or services were developed in the last five years, the last three years or the last year? What is the attitude to constructive risk-taking in the company? How do you support creativity in your staff? How are new products developed? With a picture of the present state, you are ready to take the next step: dismantling the staff suggestion scheme. (If you don't have one, skip the next paragraph.) This may seem crazy. How can getting rid of the main mechanism for staff to contribute creative ideas help? The trouble is, suggestion schemes are divisive (technical cost-saving ideas take the lion's share of awards), slow, bureaucratic and misleading. Suggestion schemes say 'being creative isn't part of your job, so do it in your spare time'. But to gain lasting competitive advantage, creativity needs to be at the centre of what everyone does, all the time. Make a big thing of dismantling the scheme, celebrating its past successes but describing the need for something more: open communications and explicit reward for creativity. Open communications are needed to make sure that ideas flow properly. A great tool for this is giving all staff e-mail, and it should be made plain that it is acceptable to send an e-mail to anyone, from the chairman down. Such a cultural change (as it will be in most organizations) requires direct support from all levels. Responses to such e-mails need to be quick and action-oriented. If a member of staff doesn't know who to send a suggestion to, it should be routed through their manager, without any implication of filtering. Once there is such an easy flow of communications, the suggestion scheme will seem an aberration. Harder to achieve, but just as essential, is tangible reward for creativity. Consider a creativity section in the staff assessment scheme. Something like: Assessment form, section 2: Creativity
To make sure that it is understood just how important creativity is, consider rewarding it separately from any other performance award, as a gift. This has two advantages - it saves money, and has more impact. A properly chosen gift has more personal value than cash. Set against a £30,000 salary, a £200 bonus is almost insulting. But compared with a run-of-the-mill £20 watch, a £200 watch is something special, something to be treasured. Of course, to be effective, the gift has to be properly chosen, which implies managers have to know their staff and put themselves out to choose something appropriate, but no one said creativity was easy. Taking this approach leads on neatly to the next necessity in the agenda - moving from management to leadership. Creativity thrives in a culture where managers lead by example; it is withered by a lack of trust. Leadership requires much more communication and openness than conventional management: it is based on coaching, not direction. Staff understand a leader's priorities and goals, getting as much feel for the 'why' of a requirement as the 'what'. Leadership is about communicating principles, not setting rules - an essential when the world is in a state of flux. It may even be that creativity requires a whole new approach to organization as ABB and Oticon have found, where the company is split into small functional groups with real autonomy. The creativity agenda can reach very deeply into the way the company works. No matter how the company is organized, innovation requires training and resources. For most of us, creativity is not a natural activity - it is more about uncommon sense than common sense. Staff and managers won't just pick it up as they go along - they need training. This is liable to cover the need for and the nature of innovation, plus specific techniques to enhance group and individual creativity. Beyond training, other resources like facilitators for important creativity sessions, and electronic resources such as e-mail and bulletin boards, will help sharpen the creative edge. If all this seems overkill for something as insubstantial as creativity, remember that it can make the difference between profitability and failure in a world where playing fields are as level as the North Sea in a force ten gale. Doing something about creativity is not an option, it is an essential. Perhaps you should be considering your own agenda today. You can find much more on the Innovation Agenda in our book on managing for creativity, Creativity and Innovation for Managers:
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Unleashed Limited 2006 |
Originally published in Professional Manager, the magazine of The Institute of Management
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