Managing Creativity MBA dissertation

FORWARD

I recently gave a presentation at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a topic entitled "Is creativity management an oxymoron?"

The essential confusion to people resistant to the idea of "creativity management" was the word "management." Replace it with the word "optimization" and the resistance disappears; all we're really trying to do is optimize the quality of the idea pool and optimize the implementation process.

Then you can suggest that most people already implicitly accept the idea of creativity management: if you ask them to solve a problem or engage in a particular endeavour, one of the things they're likely to do is herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct some sort of brainstorming session and implicit in that action is the acceptance that certain methods, processes and procedures enhance creative output.

Then you can begin discussing how to improve the enormous amount of creative output people generate, from problem solving in everyday business life right up to the level or art.

***

TIP OF THE DAY: GOOD CREATIVITY LEADERSHIP

Creativity and Innovation requires good leaders to facilitate, manage, guide and optimise output. There are certain characteristics that leaders should exhibit:

a) Good leaders are adept at switching between low and high status – high for keeping control and low to ensure others do NOT shut down.

b) Good leaders are aware that idea generation is a cognitive process and encourage expression of that cognitive activity.

c) Good leaders tend to spend significant amounts of time on problem identification.

d) Good leaders allow participants periods of incubation to arrive at richer solutions.

e) Good leaders take advantage of time pressure to force output.

f) Good leaders allow direct access to decision makers, knowing that ideas are diluted and feedback decreased when passing through layers.

***

If you haven't already done so, you can buy the MBA Research Project on Managing Creativity and Innovation, DIY Audit, Good Idea Generator software and the 50 slide Powerpoint Presentation from http://www.managing-creativity.com

Best

http://www.managing-creativity.com

_________