Welcome to the third in a new series of brief interviews with guest experts from KnowledgeBrief’s Innovation Programmes, providing a window into the experts’ latest ideas and new advice for executives.
Jeanne Meinholt, Senior Researcher at KnowledgeBrief (KB), discussed how to Use Creative Techniques in Agile Design for Better Business Processes with Professor Neil Maiden (NM), Cass Business School, after our Innovation Meeting in September.
KB: What’s the key business challenge that organisations need to address, that your research tackles?
NM: There is now considerable evidence that organisations that exploit the creativity of their employees can become more effective, more productive and more competitive businesses in their markets. The question is not whether to exploit creativity, but how. Exploiting employee- and organisation-level creativity needs businesses to understand what creativity is. Whereas most understand what is sometimes called professional forms of creativity (new products, services, structures and initiatives) few organisations either comprehend or support everyday, bottom-up creativity – individuals being creative each day during everyday actions. Such creative thinking can be surprisingly productive, if businesses encourage, enable and support it.
KB: What advice would you give to executives, based on your findings?
NM: Seek to evolve your business or organisation that encourages, enables and supports more and better forms of creative thinking, and especially everyday creativity. However, before you do this, make sure that you understand what creativity is, what enables it, and what are the well-documented barriers to it. Creative problem solving can be seen as a process, so first of all, put in the right process, with the most effective creativity techniques and tools that most of your employees can use. However, process alone is not enough. Effective creative thinking needs the right organisational cultures, business climates and even human emotional states. You can influence these cultures, climates and emotions through organisational and workplace design, styles of leadership and staff empowerment. And make creativity everyone’s business – creative thinking can be applied successfully to almost every aspect of any business.
KB: How does your latest research approach this? What do the results indicate?
NM: We’ve been encouraging everyday creative thinking in a wide range of organisations using simple-to-use creativity techniques and new forms of digital technologies. These organisations range from factories and design consultancies to newsrooms and care homes.
In particular, our simple-to-use creativity techniques have been developed to work in agile projects and workplaces. Each technique is designed to deliver valuable creative outcomes in 8 minutes, without extensive prior training with the technique (although, of course, practice can be make perfect). Studies of the use of these techniques reveal that they generate outcomes that are more novel and more useful than if not used – in simple terms, more creative results.
Our new digital technologies have been delivered on diverse platforms – as public websites, apps running on smartphone and tablet devices, and plugins to existing everyday tools such as Google Docs. However, each was developed to fit in with the current work process, so that creative thinking becomes part of that process, rather than something else to do. Many of the technologies have been developed to provide creative recommendations to employees, based on the results of advanced creative searches that retrieve content from the Internet, or good social care practices, or databases of health-and-safety risks. But studies reveal that their use also generates more novel and more useful – more creative – outcomes.
KB: What did you learn or take away from meeting with the executives in the KnowledgeBrief Innovation Programmes?
NM: The enthusiasm of the delegates to embrace agile creative thinking as part of their businesses, and the wide range of its uses that is available. The potential is considerable.
With thanks to Neil Maiden, Professor of Digital Creativity, Cass Business School.
Next month, KnowledgeBrief will be talking to Dr. Thomas Roulet, King’s College London, about how the power of being divisive has helped organisations foster a stronger corporate culture. For more information, please visit the Innovation Day page.