Blog Archives

Am I Creative?

What is creativity and what makes it a vital part of the change-making process?

Depending on who is talking, the definition of creativity can change. Some say creativity is independence, the ability to do things you’d like to do. Others believe that creativity is a unique state of mind, the ability to see things differently than others.

Creativity can also be viewed as an individual with a chameleon-like ability to change in a changing environment. Another perspective is that creativity can be likened to the secret of a cockroach’s staying power over millions of years; being adaptive and being able to endure over time.

There are some people who believe that nothing is new, creativity is therefore the ability to rearrange existing variables into new combinations. Others believe the complete opposite, that creativity is in fact creating or making something that has never existed before. It can also be seen as something that is inexplicable, like a bolt of lightning that seemingly comes out of nowhere.

Yet others believe that creativity is merely a result of painstakingly hard work, like the trial and error endured by the Wright Brothers in creating the first airplane. As Thomas Edison once said, “Creativity is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”

However you choose to define creativity, the good news is that all of us are creative.

Defining creativity

Creativity is an inborn human characteristic that can be nourished, cultivated, and raised to extraordinary outcomes in almost anything that is attempted. Though it cannot be seen, creativity is as much a part of anyone as any other part of the body. What matters the most, is not how it is defined but rather how it is used.

Young boy concentrating hard and using legos to build.

As children, creativity is encouraged and thus it flourishes, allowing imaginations to continually create new ideas, objects, and even worlds. It’s contagious, and parents often find themselves being swept into their universe of make-believe. This youthful surge of creativity seems endless and leaves adults in awe of what a young mind is able to create.

For whatever reason, adults lose that sense of freedom for the imagination and can fall into the trap of suppressing a child’s creativity out of concern that it will go too far, or that the child will be out of touch with reality. Adults value practicality, we exercise logic and judgment at the expense of the imagination.

What’s the problem with that?

Anything that we do is based on established customs, precedents, and historical or current events. In the absence of these precedents, new challenges leave us perplexed and uncertain of what to do. While scientific research on creativity is wide-ranging, diverse, and difficult to quantify, we can draw a few broad conclusions:

Creativity is not a gift for a chosen few. Everyone is born with creativity; not all in the same amounts or types. We use it extensively during childhood and as we become adults, we use less than a fraction of our creative potential on a daily basis.
Creativity has little connection to IQ, gender, race, or any other demographic factor. Most people can tap into their natural creativity by learning a few basic processes and skills.

Suppressing natural creativity

Our greatest learning and creativity growth occurs between birth and age five. In these primitive years, we question, experiment, explore, welcome new experiences, and express what we feel and think. As we age, most of us undergo a conditioning process as we mature that subconsciously suppresses our creativity.

Creativity and your business

The amazing thing about human creativity is that it never actually goes away, it can be triggered to flourish with the right mindset and tools.

Creativity is an asset to organizations. It is the pathway to innovation that propels businesses to thrive and stay ahead of the competition. Over the years, Basadur has coached creativity and the innovation process by allowing individuals to unearth an inner tool that unequivocally adds value and fuels an organizational culture of creative thought and change.

To learn more about innovation and how to capitalize on the possibilities that change has to offer, visit www.basadur.com.

April 26, 2023

Future Shock – We Have to Embrace Innovation

Check your assumptions at the innovation door

Over the centuries, an adage has developed that there are two things in life that are permanent: death and taxes.

Many years ago, Sophocles (400 B.C.) suggested a third: change.

Today, almost everyone agrees with him. In the book “Future Shock,” Alvin Toffler points out that we are living in an age not just of change, but of rapid change. The acceleration is now so great, that many people are unable to cope with it and, as the title suggests, are in shock. Humans prefer to function in a more stable world. Instability and uncertainty do not resonate well as we try to control and predict our everyday lives.

No matter how hard we try or how much we think we have it all figured out, we don’t. It then becomes a matter of those who are willing to embrace, adapt, and innovate or get left behind.

Produced in 1972, the documentary based on the book “Future Shock” demonstrates how change is only accelerating.

Science suggests that mankind has been on Earth for about 50,000 years; this represents about 800 lifetimes. People did not emerge from the cave for the first 650 lifetimes. Toffler suggests that, by the time a person reaches 50 years old, they will have learned 97% percent of everything they know in the world.

The electric motor has only been around for the last two lifetimes, showing that the curve of knowledge developed by humans over time has accelerated rapidly. The amount of change a person might have experienced in a lifetime in the 1800s is experienced in approximately five years by a person in the late 1900s. Toffler illustrates this by estimating the shrinking length of time it has taken to turn various technological concepts into practical execution.

A Toffler curve that shows an orange line starting at the bottom left corner of Rate of Change and going horizontally then curing up with Time labeled on the bottom. For example, it took 140 years for the photograph to be invented and implemented for use. The radio took 40 years from conception to execution, the television 12 years, and the transistor radio only 2 years. This evolution of concept to conception demonstrates our rapidly changing world where innovation is essential in order to thrive and survive.

Even more recently, take a moment to reflect on how AI technology has seemingly come out of nowhere. ChatGPT gained user growth, 100 million, and traffic growth, 1 billion visitors per month, in record-breaking time; from December 2022 to February 2023.

Everyone is in shock at how quickly ChatGPT was launched and now, like it or not, this controversial technology is a tool that can provide opportunities for individuals and businesses, regardless of size. The bottom line for businesses will be who adapts the quickest and capitalizes most on this technological innovation.

What does all this mean?

There are two approaches a person or organization can take toward change.

One is defensive.

Fearing change, reacting toward it reluctantly, and wishing it would disappear. In short, you are controlled by change.

The second is to treat change as something that is a fact of life.

Begin by asking yourself, how might I adapt to change and turn it into an opportunity? A good visual representation of the acceptance or reflection of change can be made to that of a knife. One can grasp the blade or the handle, one side can be more dangerous than the other; change can be viewed as a threat or an opportunity.

If society or businesses didn’t accept change and innovation, we might still be rolling around in a horse and buggy or bending the antenna on our roof to sort of get a signal for our televisions.

What time has proven to us is that change is a certainty, it is as reliable as death and paying taxes. In order to succeed, there is only one choice, embrace change and begin to see the opportunities that it presents. Innovation offers a solution to continuously adapt and thrive in our inevitably changing world.

To learn more about innovation and how to capitalize on the possibilities that change has to offer, visit www.basadur.com.

February 27, 2023

Innovation Starts With The Right People

The right people with the right knowledge should achieve innovative results

Picture this scenario: you’re the Team Leader for a group of employees within your organization. You have observed endlessly the frustration and lack of motivation within your team and want to initiate change. You get approval from the CEO to implement a new program intended to re-energize your group and increase productivity…but it doesn’t. You’re left wondering what went wrong and your team is left even more unhappy because now they have something new they are expected to execute.

What happened here?

Innovation isn’t just about solving a problem and implementing a solution; it starts with ownership and ensuring you have the right people involved using a common process to collectively solve it together. In the above situation, there was a manager willing to take ownership but because the problem wasn’t properly defined, including the people it affected most, it failed. Engaging the right people in the problem-finding process provides an opportunity for a greater understanding of what’s actually going on. New facts can be unearthed, and true problem definition will help propagate a breakthrough in the innovative process.

Hand with infinity sign floating above it

Problems are infinite within organizations

Often businesses are reactive, scrambling to find solutions and losing not only profit but their share of being competitive within the market. In this post-pandemic economy, staying ahead of trends and maintaining fluency at the same time is a major challenge. Problem finding must be an intentional process identifying Generators for proactive measures and then finding balance within the team, including the other styles and those directly impacted or involved.

Finding employees who are aware of the world around them and eager to find new problems is invaluable; Generators, are proactive and deliberate in seeking out problems needing to be solved. With the internet making our world smaller and the ability for companies to reach a global market more directly, it is imperative for businesses to deliberately look for problems. The consequence of failing to meet this new economic landscape will result in a lack of evolution with consumer demand and decreased profitability.

Finding the right people to innovate

“But I don’t know who to include?!” That’s ok. There is an eight-step process to help you. When finding the right people is a problem, do a problem-solving session. The beauty of the eight-step wheel is that it can be used at any moment when you are stuck or unsure of where to go next. Stop and restart the wheel to work out the new problem.

What are the problem-solving steps in the wheel?

What are the problem-solving steps in the wheel

Use the innovation process and be patient, don’t jump ahead, and don’t abandon it because it’s hard or you think it’ll take too long. Include everyone involved in the process, and ask who can solve this problem? Who does this affect? Getting the right people involved must be intentional, even if you must go outside of your organization. Remember that executives or managers aren’t necessarily the ones who should be included.

When creating a team to problem find, be sure to consider their thinking style: Generator, Conceptualizer, Optimizer, Implementer. If possible, all of them should be represented; heavy on the Generators if problem finding is the intention. Ultimately, the problem will dictate the people and the problem’s owner needs to ensure the right balance of styles are involved.

Thanks to virtual meeting spaces such as Zoom or Google Meet, you can select individuals based on their thinking styles and not impact where they physically reside or work. So remember not to make assumptions on anyone’s behalf, representation of all expertise is important so your team finds and solves the right problem.

Innovation stalls with the wrong team

What happens if you’ve created a team and, after engaging in problem-finding, discover that you have selected the wrong individuals? Simple; start all over again. If you realize this, that’s actually problem finding, which is great, but you must start again as soon as you can. Don’t try to force the process to work without the missing people. Remember, you are in control. It is good to trust the process but don’t let it drive you, it is simply a tool to help you navigate.

Laptop on a desk that shows a group of people in a virtual meeting

How will you know if you’ve created the right team?

KNOWLEDGE + INNOVATIVE PROCESS+SKILLS (diverging and converging skills) + TOOLS (ex. brainstorming) + STYLES = INNOVATIVE RESULTS

When the owner of a problem involves the right people in problem finding they can energize each other and come up with ideas that may never have surfaced otherwise. Innovative people don’t wait for problems to find them, they seek problems to solve and often find problems that others have ignored.

Finding new problems is innovation, and people will be happy because they got results. When the right people are involved in an established process, they are provided the opportunity to create endless possibilities by interacting with one another and going beyond what is expected.

Efficiency can be achieved by almost anyone, innovation requires the organization to go beyond the immediate to revolutionize its future. By empowering the right people to innovate, they will find new ways to contribute to the company helping it evolve with a competitive edge. In-person or virtual, it doesn’t matter how the team is connected just that the right people are involved.

Ownership, the right people with the right knowledge and a process leader using a common innovation process will always achieve “out-of-the-box” results!

At Basadur, we can help you learn more about involving the right people in the innovation process.

January 18, 2023

Understanding the value and role of an innovative leader

Management must embrace the evolution of their role, from reactive solutions to proactive innovative leadership

It is fairly well-established that we’re in an age where creativity and innovation are absolutely vital for organizations to survive and thrive; if you don’t find new and unique ways to add value to customers the business is dead in the water. Competition is fierce and competitors will find what the market demands and provide that value at a cost to your own organization.

The key to driving innovation is finding leaders who aren’t afraid to take chances on establishing a process that nourishes every employee, at every level. There is a need for leaders who understand their team’s goal and the role in which they play to achieve that goal.

Innovative leaders are instrumental to organizational growth

Senior-level employees are often labeled as leaders within their organizations; there is an expectation that they’re aware of all the business’s problems and equipped to address them quickly and efficiently.

Innovative leaders go beyond this responsibility, they have in mind the major challenges of the organization but aren’t too quick to jump into solutions. Their job isn’t just to evaluate the end result but to help ensure that the process is continuous, met with open-mindedness, and allows individuals to move forwards and figure out ways to implement new ideas.

light bulb representing a new idea with many connected colored strings working in collaboration

Part of that is being able to delegate the finding and solving of organizational challenges and empowering subordinates to collaborate without judgment. When everyone feels included in the process, the possibility of finding new and unexpected ways to create value for the organization becomes the norm.

It all starts with leadership. Even if Senior Level management is currently struggling to nourish creativity, they have the ability to learn how to innovate and ultimately lead innovative teams.

Common characteristics of Senior-Level Innovative Leaders

Listen generously
Defer judgment, they entertain the idea mentally before responding or making comments
Asks clarifying questions to be certain they understand
Open to a variety of input and information, not just what impacts them
Actively thinks and considers why the things that are happening are, why they’re being experienced and is able to admit (while surrounded by a sea of ever-present immediate problems and challenges) that these might be symptoms and ask what is really going on? What’s outside of my everyday view?
Has a vision of what could be, has a greater depth and appreciation of what is important to the business
Is in tune with many different aspects of the world around them and can say “I don’t know where I’m going to find the next big idea, but I’m open to looking for it”

Innovative leaders can have all the right intentions and be ready to implement the creative process but, as often happens, internal roadblocks can interfere. An organization with an overly strong culture that values short-term goals can greatly impact the ability for innovation to thrive.

Senior Leader holding a highlighter looking at agenda filled with to-do’s

With so much to do, Senior Leaders have a hard time prioritizing what needs to be addressed first, they get caught doing too many things in an attempt to just get it done. It’s like learned helplessness; an acceptance that their job is like being on a hamster wheel and they can’t get off (especially in production or operations) and the organization is left scrambling to always try and catch up instead of getting ahead.

Other challenges Innovative Leaders face

an organizational culture that resists or avoids change, they refuse to try anything new until it is old
Coworkers or Executives who want proof before investing in a new idea
One person who disagrees or judges can destroy a potentially innovative idea

In spite of the challenges within an established business, true innovative leaders will continue to advocate for change. They will make it clear to everyone involved that the goal is to accomplish something new and novel. In doing so, innovative leaders will provide the process and skills to synchronize different mindsets, enabling them to think better together.

series of images going up stairs that represent a process to innovation

The first step in seeking innovation is to acknowledge that you and/or your team or business lack a process of innovation. Once you see this challenge, you can begin to evolve the organizational culture to focus on possible gains that could be made with any new opportunity or problem; with the outlook that finding one problem will lead to possibilities. Refocusing the mentality from worrying about losses and bad ideas to the perception of gains and opportunities.

Adopting an opportunistic philosophy in relation to organizational challenges can be the catalyst for an innovative leader to initiate positive change. If they can get others to defer judgment and consciously adopt a process that values different ways of thinking, they will trailblaze a path to innovative growth and endless organizational possibilities.

Innovative thinking starts with you. CLICK HERE to learn how.

March 29, 2022

How to Jump Start Your Meeting for Innovation and Impact. Hint: Check Your Own Assumptions at the Door

Have you ever come to a meeting and found yourself disengaged in the first five minutes? The leader who called it thought the topic was important, but you couldn’t really relate; there are other people who have more enthusiasm and better answers for this topic. As a result, your participation is half-hearted, and your attention is focused on seemingly more important issues.

What was the turnoff?

All too frequently, leaders call meetings to address issues that they themselves have defined as important. That’s OK. The real disconnect can come when they use their own, unquestioned assumptions to define the starting point. If others can’t relate to how the leader has stated the topic, it is DOA.

Oftentimes, we fail to have impactful meetings because we are naturally wired to immediately look for solutions. This preference is heightened by the fast pace of business today. Individually, or in teams, we may initially get a sense of relief from solving something and we don’t see a reason to look for additional viewpoints, facts, or input. There’s a need to believe that we already know what the problem is; that we have a grasp of the important facts, and already see what needs to be done. We typically react to any extra effort as being a waste of valuable time when there are so many other things to do!

One of the fundamental skills of creative and innovative thinking is the ability to view problems, ideas, and information from a variety of objective viewpoints rather than being overly comfortable with the notion that:

There is a correct or best: way, viewpoint, answer, or definition of the problem.
That everyone has the same viewpoint.
That everyone values the same viewpoint.
That the way a problem is initially stated is the best place to start working on it.

In any meeting, members may have firmly held, though differing, views of what a particular problem or opportunity really is. Taking them through a quick discovery process can reveal surprisingly different perspectives. Surfacing these different perspectives at the outset is crucial to being able to hold efficient and successful meetings. It helps properly orient the meeting participants to a common, shared understanding of the issue. It also enables the discovery of new ways of framing the challenge that offer more insight and value than what was originally considered.

How to problem find?

Starting the meeting by doing a quick discovery process can help avoid premature closure on limited, even incorrect views of the issue. It can prevent spending time and resources on a solution that may only address a symptom of the real issue. Mobilizing meeting participants to think of and express their perceptions of the real issue and gain consensus at the outset is hard work. The reward, however, is meetings with highly engaged participants collaborating and solving problems they agree are important. These meetings end with greater feelings of success and make a more meaningful difference to their organization.

To better understand problem-finding, below is an example of the output from a team who called a meeting to address delays and struggles in completing projects. The facilitator started things off by the meeting participants to think divergently on ways to articulate the issue they were facing. They offered the following five:

Unclear project specifications
The timelines are too short
Scope creep
The client keeps changing their mind
We focus too much on trying to keep clients happy

Each person was then directed by the facilitator to pick one of them that they considered the priority to address in the meeting.

After everyone had picked, the facilitator had each person explain – not justify or persuade – the reasoning behind their selection, while the others listened objectively. This resulted in an increased understanding of the different options and allowed for the point-of-view of their peers to be shared openly. They were then guided to agree on one of the five, the group chose “#3: scope creep”, as the starting point for the meeting.

It took a grand total of 10 minutes of meeting time to come to a collective agreement and get everyone’s engagement. The session ended with solutions and action steps, assigned responsibilities and timelines, and people left feeling good about the time they had spent together.

Problem Finding in 10 minutes or less

The leader states the problem or issue in a simple sentence and indicates this is just a starting point.
Everyone is encouraged to share a different way to state the issue. Do not judge or evaluate any contribution, just accept them and add them to the list. Number each one as it is expressed until there is agreement that the list is sufficient (everyone is satisfied that there are good-enough options on the list).
Ask each person to pick one (or two if the list consists of more than 10) of the articulations that resonate most with his/her view.
The facilitator quickly goes through in order each of the items that were picked and asks, “who picked this one and why?”
Each team member describes concisely their rationale, without attempting to persuade or justify, until all items have been discussed. Others are objectively listening to the rationale to increase their understanding of the issue.
Finally, team members are asked to converge on the one formulation they want to take forward to address in the meeting.

Problem finding doesn’t have to be tedious, the more you use this process, the easier it becomes. Try it in an upcoming team meeting and let us know!

Want more guidance?

CLICK HERE to visit my website or send an email to ellen@leadershipdialogues.com

Want to learn more about your innovation style?

CLICK HERE to take our complimentary profile or email tbasadur@basadur.com for questions.

Co-authored by:

Ellen L. Moran, Ph.D

CEO Leadership Dialogues

Building Solutions Through Insightful Conversations

Tim Basadur

VP Primary Researcher & Facilitator, Basadur Applied Creativity

Building Innovative Cultures For Over 40 Years

March 11, 2022

More Creativity in Less Time

What individuals and organizations need for speedier and greater creativity is skills, processes, tools and a common language to speed up creative work.

Who’s got time to be creative?

Gone are the days when a company could assign creative work to a select group, in the marketing or R&D departments, and wait for something big to happen. Organizations today face complex challenges like global competition and technological advancement daily and must enlist everyone in their organization to seek creativity, to find and solve problems and to capitalize on new trends and opportunities. Managers working in functional silos can no longer solve important corporate problems alone. A more complex world calls for the combined expertise of multiple functions to solve problems.

Lack of Problem Finding and Problem Solving

At all levels, individuals, teams and organizations suffer from a number of common short-comings in finding and solving problems and people within these levels are prone to the following:

When considering new ideas, they are often prematurely critical and shut down the flow of productive thinking.
They hope, above all, to be perceived as practical and economical and they allow judgment to enter into play too quickly.
Rather than build upon promising but imperfect ideas, they discard them.
Taught to be logical, they assume that every problem has only one right answer.
They test new ideas mentally, in the abstract, rather than trying them out and welcoming the opportunity to learn and perhaps uncover unexpected outcomes and opportunities.
Attempting to equate new and old experiences, they search for what is similar and use available solutions rather than what is unique or new in a new problem.
Decisions are directed toward a single goal, even though most problems involve multiple goals that must be addressed at the same time.
People tend to wait for others to find problems for them to solve rather than take the initiative to seek out or anticipate problems, changes, trends and opportunities.

Few assignments come precisely defined and it is this condition that provokes frustration and anxiety as they try to adjust to continual and accelerating change.

How to navigate uncharted territory? How to know what to do?

It’s challenging enough to encourage people to think in innovative ways on their own, it’s even more difficult to encourage people to think creatively together as a team or group. People understand things in different ways: some gain understanding through experience, others in the abstract or through theory. Lacking awareness of these differences in their cognitive styles, most people lack the necessary tools or skills to discuss what and how they are thinking.

The creative process is a cognitive process, one that requires people to think well together in new ways and one that requires a leader to synchronize the thinking of everyone in the group. Leaders need defined skills and tools to implement the process and help people think creatively together. To be effective, leaders must learn and recognize distinctly different cognitive styles within the creative process and convey to team members the complementary nature of these styles.

Adaptable Organization

People must learn to think differently and leaders must lead them to think in new ways. Leaders can also help others to:

Execute basic creative thinking skills to overcome shortcomings in solving recognized problems.
Follow a synchronized process for innovative thinking (that goes beyond solving obvious problems) to find and define new problems and to solve and implement those new solutions.
Follow this process with other individuals or within groups or teams.

Additional shortcomings include a lack of basic creative thinking skills, such as the inability to defer judgment or to keep an open mind or to think divergently. These inadequacies have been documented by many researchers, notably Elbing, 1978, and Basadur, 1994.

Methods to overcome shortcomings in solving identified problems have also been documented by Basadur, Graen and Green (1982) which showed that training made people more open-minded to new ideas and approaches, more open to new and unusual product ideas and more likely to defer critical judgment. They spent less time in negative evaluation during idea generation and were more open to trying new, unusual approaches to problem solving.

Think Innovatively Together

Creative leadership means leading people through a common process or method of finding and defining problems, solving them, and implementing the new solutions. This process requires a common language that enables everyone to quickly understand which stage of the creative process they are in at any given moment. Recognizing that people favor various stages of this creative process, leaders need skills in managing individuals and teams in a fluid but orderly fashion through the creative process.

Effective leaders must learn and recognize distinctly different cognitive styles within the creative process and convey to team members the complementary nature of these styles. Mastery of this process provides a blueprint for innovation leadership that gets results. In short, we all need a process formula to guide us and skills and tools to make the formula work – effectively, becoming more creative in less time.

It starts with you, the leader. Take a COMPLIMENTARY Profile and learn your preference in creative thinking styles. Ready to take the next step? We help build innovative cultures; EXPLORE HOW.

12 3 4 Next ›Last »