Managing Leadership^®

A major mistake executives in all specialties and at all levels make is confronting the very real problem of creativity head on. Generating creativity is not a “to do list” item, it isn’t a set of techniques an individual employs, and it isn’t the ineffable outcome of a magical brew of personality types you just pour into a room and stir. It comes from people, yes . . . but when they focus on “being creative” it always seems to elude their grasp.

So, is it real, and if so, where does it come from?

It is real, but I argue that in most enterprises it has to be more an organizational than an individual characteristic. After all, we’re talking here about business, not art. Artists contemplate . . . well, who knows what they contemplate when they create, or to what end they contemplate it? Organizations, though, are about solving problems – ultimately, their customers’ problems. It is by frankly contemplating these that organizations – including businesses – generate innovative ideas and creative means of attaining them.

The first issue is properly framing the problem. Is it a customer issue, directly? If so, is the customer at the table, at least for the initial discussions, or has a team of marketers, designers, and engineers visited with the customer to help determine the nature of the real problem, or, perhaps, to offer alternative ways for the customer to frame the problem? If the customer is a mass market, have you considered using interactive social networking programs to assess this, or even anthropological forays into the market?

Once the problem is framed, it is important for everyone within your organization who is involved with it in any way to also be involved in the construction of the solution, be they designers, engineers, or the training team that will accompany the product back to the customer. All of their insights combined, shared and commented upon by everyone at the same (at least, figurative) table, together with a thorough grasp of what the customer is trying to accomplish, will produce creative solutions that come from the most unlikely sources (even from left-brained people) and may even not be recognized, as they evolve, to be the innovations they truly are.

We’ve recently seen how a company known for innovation manages it. Consider also the example of an electric utility, Eskom, in South Africa. Utilities aren’t known as nests of creativity, but this one has produced a hatfull. One of them was a prepaid card that customers who had no permanent residence (for sustained use or even for billing) could use to obtain electricity wherever they happened to be. This involved understanding the problem from the customer’s perspective, and then seeking solutions to it with input and comment from everyone within the organization from engineers to accountants, as well as coordination with other organizations, such as the post-office, where the cards were sold.

The same approaches, or straightforward modifications of them, apply to generating what turn out to be creative, even innovative, solutions to internal problems revolving around costs, procedures, timelines, and efficiency. Creativity and innovation come from people striving to understand and solve problems, not from people striving to be creative or innovative.

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