Can Workforce Creativity be Cultivated?

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading quite a few articles about creativity, whether it’s innate or can be taught; if it can be found in the workforce or is it’s immune; and how creativity can be leveraged from child learners to adult learners.

Today, I’m writing about creativity within the workforce. Can it be cultivated or is it just plain out of the question? Has creativity been downsized, right-sized, out-sourced, in-sourced, or simply forgotten?

James Kerr recently wrote a blog article “Cultivating a Creative Workforce” that really struck a chord with me. I am also reading Daniel Pink’s new book “Drive,” which focuses on motivation and how to identify what motivates you to succeed by looking at things creatively.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. In Kerr’s article he talks about creativity’s two components—production and consumption, with creative inspiration coming from consumption. His theory is one must consume creative things in order to produce creative things.

I get that.

How that plays out in the workforce is interesting, even though the concept seems juvenile, yet genius at the same time. He suggests that an organization can promote creativity by simply allowing people to observe, read, watch, listen, and play. Now that sounds rather similar to the Raving Fans concept. That concept, as you know, does work! See how Kerr has used creativity to repurpose a similar concept into one of his own?

He also suggests that organizations can do this through acts such as supporting the arts, hosting community programs, sponsoring books clubs, and other meetings and events to encourage its staff to think creatively. “An enterprise can encourage that by regularly emphasizing the importance of the arts and awareness of how it can be influential in improving the way work is done,” he writes.

Even at times, he suggests, creativity is born from constructs of other things. For example, he mentioned how modern jazz was influenced from African tribal drumming. The Internet was developed from other uses and technology. Another analogy is to reflect on how fashion is often based on something created decades or possibly centuries beforehand.

Therefore, management teams do not need to fear creativity as being something to be constructed as a wholly new concept, idea, or theme; but rather, as an idea generation, a birth of an evolution of ideas based upon previous works—evolutionary versus revolutionary.

How to do it

One way to get creativity to resonate within an organization is to cultivate a creative project that might tackle an existing policy or management practice. Engage people from around the organization—a cross-functional group—to participate. The combination of people’s skills, abilities, and experience helps to bring a sense of diversity to the project that can spawn creative solutions to a mundane business problem.

Take Zappos for example. They are well known for their customer service model. It was based on themes from several previous models and enhanced, creating what some people consider to be a superb customer service model.

Kerr closed his article with a great sentiment, “Cross-discipline work exposes participants to new thought models and problem solving paradigms, often leading to creative outcomes that would not have been recognized otherwise.”

How has your organization spawned creativity within its culture ?

Share your story.

Ciao!