The power of unexpected

By Alan G Robinson

Presentation by Mohammed Akbar Gani NCRDS Sterling Institute of Management Studies . Roll no 35 MMS 1st year

Review
The True Nature of Corporate creativity. The Six Element of Corporate creativity. Alignment Self initiated activity. Unofficial activity. Serendipity. Diverse stimuli. within company communication.

The Nature of Corporate Creativity

A company is creative when its employee do something new and potential useful without being directly shown or thought. Corporate creativity leads to improvement and innovation both of which are essential for long term survival and success of a company. Most creative acts are improvement.

Creative acts are not planned for and come from where they are least expected.
Nobody can predict who will be involved in them?, what they will be?, when they will occur? Or how they will happen.

Company can enhance their creative performance by recognizing the nature of their creativity and learning how to actively promote unanticipated improvement and innovation.

The Six Essential of Corporate Creativity

There are six essential element that play a key role in promoting corporate creativity.It is not possible to predict the specific creativity acts that will be the result, but the likelihood of their occurrence gets vastly enhanced when all these six elements are present. Managing creativity is about raising probability These six elements will help company in increasing frequency with which creativity acts occurs. They are Alignment, Self-initiated activity, unofficial activity, serendipity, diverse stimuli and within company communication.

Alignment

This ensures that the interests and actions of all employees are directed toward a companys key goals, so that any employee will recognize and respond positively to a potentially useful idea. Its effects on corporate creativity are visible only if the company is either very strongly aligned or completely misaligned. This is because this requires discipline, persistence, and hard work. There are three factors that make up strong alignment. First of all, the organization has to be clear about its goals. The second factor is commitment to initiatives that promote the key goals. The third and last factor is accountability for actions that affect the key goals. Corrective actions should be taken if these decisions are not in alignment with the goals.

Self-initiated activity
Self-initiated activity ensures that the intrinsic motivation is much higher than if the project had been planned or given to them by someone else such as the management.
Every person in the company should be confident that her ideas would be considered in a timely and fair manner. The system must be based on intrinsic motivation. Rewards must be minimized in the long run so that the inherent motivation of employees to think and generate winning ideas is tapped.

Unofficial activity

This is activity that occurs in the absence of direct official support, and with the intent of doing something new and useful. Resistance and opposition to new ideas are quite common in any organization. Unofficial activity provides such new ideas a safe haven to incubate till such time that they are strong enough to overcome such resistance. According official status to any new idea also stunts its progress by setting up barriers to creativity. Almost every creative act has an appreciable period of unofficial activity. Companies need to provide employees the space to conduct unofficial activity.

Serendipity

(The happening of things by chance in a good manner)

Serendipity helps in bridging this distance. Companies can promote serendipity in three ways. The first approach is to increase the frequency of accidents that could turn out to be fortunate. This can be achieved by adopting a bias for action, toward tinkering, toward empirical research work. The second approach is to increase awareness of the accidents that do occur. Companies must educate employees not to overlook exceptions. The third useful approach is to increase the companys domain of sagacity to turn more accidents into fortunate ones.

Diverse stimuli

A stimulus may help in providing fresh insight into something that a person is already set to do, or it might show him something very different. It is impossible to predict how an individual will react to a stimulus; another may not even notice what provokes one person. Companies can leverage this element by providing employees the opportunity to communicate with each other about various stimuli that they encounter at their place of work. This may help some of the stimuli to have an impact on suitable individuals. Companies must identify stimuli and provide them to employees. Rotation of employees into every job they are capable of doing should be common practice. Companies must also arrange for their employees to interact with those outside the company who are likely to be the source of their stimuli.

Within-company communication

Planned activities in organizations are carried out with the support of well-knit lines of communication. But such networks do not facilitate corporate creativity. Unanticipated within-company communication helps individuals in getting the needed knowledge and information to pursue their new ideas. There are three ways in which an organization can promote within-company communication. Firstly, it should provide opportunities for employees who do not normally interact with each other to meet. Secondly, the company should ensure that every employee has a sufficient understanding of the organizations activities to be able to tap its resources and expertise. The third and most important point is to create a new organizational priority: all employees should know the importance of being responsive to requests for information or help from other employees.

Glance of the book

These six elements offer a way to realize the tremendous creative potential that each company possesses. They also serve as benchmarks against which other companies and their practices can be evaluated in order to learn and improve an organization. These elements will force people to question their assumptions and to realize the enormous possibilities that exist within each company. The above book review from Corporate Creativity, by Alan G. Robinson, published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. San Francisco, 1997. All rights of the authors and publisher are reserved.