The 3 essentials for creating a creative culture at work
Google is perhaps most famous for pushing the boundaries of the workplace with its informal, playful working spaces, relaxed working practices and the enviable perks it offers, all in the pursuit of creativity and great ideas.
Obvious, isn’t it, for a business that depends on innovation in a keenly competitive communications market where the generation of ideas is critical to success? But doesn’t that describe most markets today? Shouldn’t we all be looking to create a culture in the workplace that drives the generation of ideas that can add value to our products and processes? If ‘yes’, then why isn’t this an item at the top of most organisations’ agendas?
Creativity at work easier said than done?
If the number and range of articles on the subject are anything to go by, developing a culture of creativity in the workplace is something that is more easily said than done. Culture change within an organisation is a complex undertaking, and where it’s necessitated by something vague and unmeasurable that people can’t relate directly to productivity and targets, it may seem like an uphill struggle.
For a start, it’s essential to have in place a management team that:
- Knows what it wants from its creativity culture
- Is committed to trying out new ideas
- Believes that all staff have a part to play in the process.
But a culture of creativity is much more than this. People have to unlearn old patterns of thinking, they have to feel empowered to think freely, and they should not be afraid to fail. As Sir Ken Robinson so aptly put it in his TED Talk “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” It is the organisational culture that creates a working environment that permits, even encourages, people to fail. Excitingly, the energy created by new ideas is infectious, and it seems that the more ideas we generate, the better.
A culture of creativity values imaginative, lateral, and divergent thinking. Some organisations create cross-departmental working teams in order to enable people to see, and make, new connections. Creativity is about unseeing what we know in the search for new things we’ve not yet thought of. Steve Jobs saw this convergence of known things synthesised into something new as key to his success. In her blog in HuffPost Business, Alison Quirk, EVP of State Street Corporation, talks about teamwork and individuality, and the different approaches people bring to problem solving. She emphasises the power and energy that’s unleashed by building on the ideas of others through collaboration.
There’s clearly no magic bullet here. However, an enabling culture of creativity should exist at every level in the organisation, from the shop floor to the boardroom, in order to get lots of ideas flowing. In the words of Edward deBono “It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”