The creative organisation - where to start?

The Creative Organisation – where to start?

Last month I outlined some of the reasons why organisations fear creativity and why this is a dangerous limitation. Ideas are the life blood of business. Without them how can a business assess what opportunities are around the corner, what options are available to solve current issues and how best to change and evolve?

In addition, a business where ideas are suffocated is a business where people are suffocated. Employees will always have thoughts about what doesn’t work well and what could be improved. Without the means to articulate those thoughts (and a belief that they will be considered seriously) staff start to feel disconnected with their organisation, then disenchanted and eventually engagement drops.

So where does an organisation start if it wants to enable a culture of creativity?

In a sense it doesn’t matter – something is better than nothing!

But, ultimately, you are looking to create an environment where people feel safe to express themselves, speak openly and venture forth their ideas. Whilst there may be infrastructure problems (a steep hierarchy, lots of red tape, resource limitations) or environmental problems (unpleasant office space, lack of light, noise, bad lighting) what really gets in the way of creativity is company culture.

The Freedom to Fail
Many companies talk about encouraging failure. Very few really walk the talk. They see the long term benefit i.e. experimentation and free thinking sometimes leads to unsuccessful outcomes but this is part of the journey towards finding really unique, appropriate, ground-breaking, clever solutions. But the short term costs are seen as too great –
• It will cost money
• People may “waste time” on projects that don’t work
• We may disappoint customers because an experiment went wrong
• We can’t take a chance with this particular piece of work. It is just too important

However the freedom to fail does not have to mean “intentional failure”. What it can mean is that when failure occurs we learn from it AND we treat success and failure the same way.

You don’t have to promote failure to be failure tolerant. Mistakes will occur, things will go wrong, good ideas will turn bad. But then what? Ideally, you will want to assess what happened. What worked (even if, overall, the project failed)? What didn’t work? What can we learn? What needs to be different next time?

There is no room for blame or accusation. If people feel they will be blamed for a mistake or for taking a chance, no one is going to put their head above the parapet next time there is a problem that needs to be solved.

Treating success and failure the same means analysing successes as well as analysing failure. Sometimes something works out by accident. It cannot be replicated. Sometimes it works for specific reasons which need to be understood so they can be repeated. We tend to pass over successes, taking them for granted, and lingering on failures. Be just as robust in your analysis of success.

Being failure tolerant does not mean putting up with shoddy work. But it does mean understanding that good ideas don’t necessarily appear fully formed. They emerge after tweaking and experimenting, trial and error. Going back to the drawing board need not be an admission that you failed but an acknowledgement that you tried, you learnt and now you are in a better position to make an improvement.

No matter how junior or senior you are in your organisation you can model this behaviour.
• You can refuse to participate in back-biting and blaming
• You can ask questions (those beginning with “what” and “how” are particularly powerful e.g. “What happened?”, “What did we learn?”)
• You can analyse success as intensively as you analyse failure
• You can encourage the exploration of ideas, letting them grow and develop rather than shooting them down at the first sign of a problem
• You can support other people who have taken risks for the benefit of the team or the organisation even if those risks did not pay off