Businesses today operate in a volatile, unforgiving environment where complex problems and rapid change are the norm.
In his book Accelerate, Harvard Professor John Kotter explores how fast the world is moving and provides data showing the rapid rates of change in a variety of areas since the mid-1900s.
According to Kotter, the data is convincing: “on almost every important business index, the world is racing ahead. The stakes – financial, social, environmental, and political – are rising in a similar exponential way.”
He describes the need for companies to concurrently maintain rigid systems and structures and develop parallel agile, adaptable systems that will be able to cope with the rapid changes.
Businesses need to innovate faster in order keep up with the pace of change. But ironically, just when innovation is needed the most is the time when companies are cutting spending or worse still, assuming that innovation doesn’t apply to their product or service.
If companies allow themselves to be controlled by bureaucracy and administration rather than creativity and innovation, they typically become stifled by rules and processes that make it impossible to accelerate change and create an innovation culture.
So what is the solution?
The general trend is towards recognising that such complex problems and rapid change must be dealt with creatively.
What we need are creative change leaders.
Creative change leadership is a relatively new approach to leadership that has been studied by luminaries such as Dr Gerard Puccio from the International Centre of Studies in Creativity at the State University of New York.
Creative change leadership has been described by Dr Puccio as “the ability to deliberately engage one’s imagination to define and guide a group towards a novel goal—a direction that is new for the group. As a consequence of bringing about this creative change, creative leaders have a profoundly positive influence on their context… and the individuals in that situation.”
As Dr Puccio asserts, leadership needs to be the catalyst for change and when it interacts effectively with creativity as the process of change, the result an innovation culture and the successful adaptation to change.
Creative change leaders therefore need to be able to deal with complexities, embrace innovation proactively and ensure that creativity is part of the business’ DNA.
The Bottom-line Benefits of Creativity
Research shows that at the age of five, 98% of us have creative genius. This drops to 2% by the age of thirty. So, in addition to taking the obvious steps of dedicating resources to staying ahead of the game, you need to intentionally invest in up-skilling yourself and your people to rekindle imagination at work.
What’s more research also shows that the payback for companies investing in this kind of development include:
- Tangible cost savings
- Increase in patentable concepts
- Increase in viable ideas from those who attended a creativity workshop compared with those who did not
- A $20 ROI for every $1 spent
How to Develop Your Creativity
By combining the imaginative with the rational, Mindplay™ helps you to unleash your creative ability to address such challenges.
If you like to find out more about how to rekindle your creativity and imagination at work join us for one of our creativity workshops taking place in London and Leeds on 12 and 14 September.