Managing Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace

Institute of Leadership & Management

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780080464411
• eBook ISBN: 9781136385407
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Super series are a set of workbooks to accompany the flexible learning programme specifically designed and developed by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) to support their Level 3 Certificate in First Line Management. The learning content is also closely aligned to the Level 3 S/NVQ in Management. The series consists of 35 workbooks. Each book will map on to a course unit (35 books/units).

Session B

Encouraging creativity

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1 Introduction

‘If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.’

Albert Einstein

In Session A, we saw that creativity is usually associated with artists and craftspeople but that everyone is capable of being creative, of thinking novel and appropriate ideas. Unfortunately most people lack the confidence to think such ideas, at least at work.

We spend so much of our lives learning to think and act conventionally, and to follow the rules and procedures the way that things have always been done. If you want to get people to think novel and appropriate ideas you need to create an environment in which this is seen to be possible. There are also a number of different techniques that you can use to encourage people to think of creative ideas, and in this session we will help you to use some of these techniques to encourage creativity in your team.

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2 The innovation cycle

This session and Session C will use the idea of the innovation cycle to help you use creative techniques to finding innovative ways of resolving problems and developing news ways of working, new products and new services.

The innovation cycle involves four stages, and this session will focus on the first two of these:

These four stages start with Divergence, the ‘opening up’ stage; this means encouraging people to come up with as many new and different ideas as they can, with no limit on imagination — the more outrageous the better. This is the chance to be creative, to look for ways of doing things which have never been thought of before because they turn received opinion upside down. Practicality must not be allowed to interfere with the generation of ideas, and quantity of ideas is better than quality.

Assimilation is the stage at which the ideas are sorted and their value is judged. It is important not to discard those which are different just because they are different but to sort through them and find the bits that are worth using. This is the stage which takes most time and is when the real breakthroughs can occur, when the impossible starts to be seen as the possible.

Some of the creative techniques (to encourage divergence) also have assimilation built in to them, others require it to be added on, as you will see.

It is valuable still to have more ideas than can actually be used after the assimilation stage for the move onto Convergence or ‘closing down’, deciding just what to go ahead with. The criteria for agreement before making the decision should be agreed, so the final choice is based on rational decisions and not just what people feel most comfortable with. The final stage is Action, implementing the decision.

The four creativity techniques we will look at in detail in this session are:

Brainstorming

TRIZ

SCAMPER

Synectics

We will also consider some variants on these, including Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and Trigger Sessions (variants on Brainstorming), and Lateral Thinking and Random juxtaposition (variants on Synectics).

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3 Brainstorming

Brainstorming is probably the most widely used (and abused) technique for encouraging creative thinking. Is has been round for more than half a century, having been developed by American advertising man, Alex Osborn. He first described it in his 1948 book Your Creative Power.

Activity 8

Have you ever taken part in a brainstorming session? What did you think about it? What rules (if any) were used to govern the activity?

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Brainstorming is designed to be used with a group, ideally one that is large enough to include some diversity of experience and personality, but not so large that individuals may not get a chance to contribute. Around five to nine people are probably ideal. The rules (and there must be rules to make sure it works properly) are:

Make sure that the purpose of the br...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series preface
• Unit specification
• Workbook introduction
• Session A The importance of creativity and innovation
• Session B Encouraging creativity
• Session C Encouraging innovation
• Performance checks
• Reflect and review