How to Bring Innovation to your Business
Creativity leads to Innovation.
People give a lot of lip service to innovation and creativity. But what does it really mean? And how do you go about getting more of it into your company? And do you even want more innovation and creativity? I believe that you do, even if it feels like you might lose control in the process and unleash the craziness.
Researchers in the creativity field (I’m a bit of an academic geek when it comes to creativity, innovation and human potential) breaks down what creativity is into four understandable aspects. I’m going to highlight them here and then go into depth in future blogs.
According to creativity researchers, person, place, process and product are the four generally accepted facets to creativity.
Person - We tend to think of people as being either creative or not creative, like it is a fixed attribute such as one’s height or eye-color. Stories about modern creatives such as Steve Jobs and I.M. Pei and past creatives such as Thomas Edison, Madame Curie and Michelangelo warp our image of the creative person. But creativity is not unique or mysterious -- we are all creative to different degrees. Creativity has little to do with IQ. It is our usage or under-usage of our ordinary thinking processes that impact our creative output. Creative thinking approaches can be learned by all individuals. More about how to do that in future blogs. Why bother with personal creativity? Research has shown that the use of creative thinking techniques reduces costs, increases efficiency and positively impacts ROI.
Place - Our families, schools, community, religion, and workplace as well as the overall culture in which we live have major impacts on creativity. We can probably all remember a time when we were encouraged or discouraged from being creative and whether our ideas or products were recognized as being creative. My friend tells the story of being reprimanded for coloring the sky green in school – she later became an art teacher (lucky students!). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (CHIK-sent-me-hi-ee) creativity researcher, and most famously known as the founder of the concept “Flow”) says that the environment has more of an impact on creative outcomes than an individual intent on creativity. So the environment of your business really matters and can significantly affect intrinsic motivation, both positively and negatively.
Process - what happens in order for any of us to produce a creative idea or product? We typically go through many attempts before we are satisfied with the outcome. Shouldn’t all those failed attempts be considered creative?
I love the creative process, because it’s something that each of us experiences whether we realize it or not. And as business leaders we can create the environment that encourages this creative process.
In general, there are four stages - preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. With preparation, we learn a skill or gather data to solve a problem. Our brain is working on things in the background during the incubation stage. Think of how often a solution suddenly came to you when you were walking, or driving or in the shower – this activity allows for incubation. This is the most powerful and critical stage, yet we often don’t give ourselves or others the time for this stage. To keep moving forward in our business, we want to solve problems as soon as possible, so we expect ourselves and our staff to consciously and continually work on a problem to conclusion. But our brains can’t be forced into things. The ‘aha’ or illumination stage, however, can only occur after an incubation period. When we get that ‘aha,’ we know with certainty that we are on the right path. In the last stage, verification, we try and test the solution to make sure it fits the problem.
The creative process is not a straight-line process. I know that can be frustrating to those of us who are organized. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are going back and forth between the stages. But allowing ourselves and our team to shift between stages is critical to the creative process.
Product - Can you make money from it? Do your peers and society admire you because of it? That’s not necessarily a bad thing – you are in business to make money and to matter. But unfortunately, in our materially focused culture, we just look at the finished product and forget there was a process of multiple creative failures that happened first. We may disregard the environment or the team of people that encouraged the development of the product. For example, the legend of Michelangelo painting alone is not true. He had a team of painters working with him on the Sistine Chapel, and even then, it took 4 years to complete.
Here's where it gets fun. How we think, how we, as leaders, respond to what our teams produce, the work environment that we set up, and the processes we allow ourselves to go through all combine to impact the production and acceptance of new ideas, insights and products. It is impossible to consider any one of these in a vacuum. We cannot separate the person from their environment, the idea from the person, the process from the environment, or the product from the process.
It is complicated, but not impossible, I promise you, to address all of these facets within your company, and to bring more innovation into your business. In the next series of blogs, I will go into each of the four facets in more depth.