Some bullet-point thinking around creativity in the workplace.

1. PAUL
KNIGHT
Some Bullet-Point
THINKING
CREATIVITY
Truly original ideas rarely start off as the best ideas.
Lets replace ‘best’ with ‘most creative’ or ‘most original’ if we are
striving for breakthrough innovation.
The ‘best’ ideas will keep operations moving forward. For radical
transformation we need a new lens, it’s blank sheet of paper time.
An example of changing the lens: Early digital cameras produced
very low quality results. Even today, a good SLR camera that uses film is
will produce better quality images than nearly all digital SLR cameras. So,
if people in the film industry were asked 10 years ago: which is better,
improved film or digital images, they would have answered "improved
film." The problem, in this case, is that they were looking at the wrong
criteria: quality of images and ease of printing. However, digital
photography has become the standard for completely different reasons:
convenience, no need to buy film, ability to manipulate images
immediately and ease of sharing images on the Internet. In fact, most
people do not care a great deal about the quality of images.
Highly creative ideas by their very nature are original and can not be
benchmarked or compared.
Organisations wishing to be more innovative must encourage and
reward originality, creativity, risk taking and rule breaking. Organisations
must get comfortable with failure and learning from mistakes.
The key to developing a creative and innovative organisation is not
just the relentless generation of fresh ideas, it’s the ability to deliver them.
Implementing creative ideas requires emotional energy and resilience.
Creativity is rarely found in isolation. Connection opportunities can
magnify the creative output of teams and/or organisations. Meetings
have a bad rap and rightly so, but the importance of getting people
together should not be underestimated.