Created on 2016-01-14 10:32
Published on 2016-01-14 10:44
Published on January 14, 2016
Paying people to work would not work so well by itself only. Inspiring them is not enough, anymore. Creative team work add the quality of life on working places that could make the difference and all we know how much is important differentiate ourselves by others.
Great companies are struggling about innovation, creativity, leadership and team working in order to create the most joyful and effective working experience. Moreover they are strongly oriented to control the productive environment in order to increase their competitiveness and attract the bests.
Nowadays, most of young people get out from a bachelor degree practically with no any team working experience. Watching them while they are enjoying this experience in a controlled and tutored environment is a such emotion. Could you imagine the excitement of those are making such experience? The energy, the confidence, the team consciousness, the creativity and positive feeling they sprinkles around warm up the souls.
To keep people creative they need to feel confident that they could express themselves freely without any judgement. Any idea, despite it could seem weird or even crazy could bring the imagination to another step and helps people to see things from different perspective. In the first place of a creative approach the number of ideas is much important of their quality. Quality will arrive later in the funnel process when a screening will be conduct.
A complex project usually requires a big number of people working on it. Each one could bring relevant information and his/her own perspective. We are used to divide a project into components, assigning the development of each component to small team and some tasks for each person in the team. Dividing a complex system into smaller and simpler parts, is the key for the job parallelism and allows to keep small each group. Small groups are be able to conduct meeting and brainstorming better than big ones.
However, the small size of teams is a limit for creativity because just a small number of people will focus on each component. Usually, we could assume that the design of the entire project has been obtained by a creative team working as well. Apparently, it seems there is no any solution than dividing a design into levels and a complex issue into smaller parts. If this would be absolutely true, it would not happen that a simpler disruptive solution could be imagined during implementation.
Innovative companies tend to increase contacts and dialogue among different groups across hierarchy and functions in order to let people freely exchange information about what they are doing, available resources, opportunities, solutions and which kind of problems they are facing. This tends to disrupt the influencing power of the hierarchy but greatly increases the synergy among groups which is a precondition for the expression of creativity into job places.
Once synergy has well establish is not uncommon that a simpler and most effective design would emerge during implementation and in particular during early stages of implementation. In facts, as much as people worked on idea and produced whatsoever (documentation, code, prototypes, etc.) as much as they embraced the idea that they cannot change something in favour of something else: the idea of facing a loss is usually stronger compared with the idea of obtaining an advantage.
Real creativity brings innovation, it tends to disrupts social bonds and hierarchies as well. It has the inherent tendency to get out the box, whatever the box means: implementation constrains, social bonds, hierarchies, status-quo, etc. This is the reason because very creative people seems a little bit weird, at the beginning.
Managing creative people is much more difficult than common clerks. Bringing creativity arises the need to have leaders rather than bosses, arises the need to manage people, processes and project with more relaxed rules. Fortunately creativity is also the key to address these new challenges. In fact, leadership is related to creativity and freedom as much as the dictatorship is related to strict rules and bounds.
So far, creativity is not only a way to approach a problem or deliver a solution. It is completely another kind of mind-set, social and working scheme compared to those we are used to see in the past. This is the reason because we call it disruptive: it challenges our ideas about how things should work because they may work differently not only better.
You are entitled to share this post without modifications for non commercial purposes.
(C) 2016, Roberto A. Foglietta, licensed under Creative Common Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike v4.0 International Terms (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).