Ways to foster creativity and innovation within teams
Everyone is creative and capable to infuse innovation while problem solving, individually or as a team. If we understand how to spark these two ingredients, that is when good things really happen.
When we were little boys and girls, we spent a bunch of good times being creative. By imagining, dreaming, emulating our idols, role playing, storytelling or even playing video games. We sparked creativity in so many ways while in most of them we tested, we experimented, and we kept doing it because we wanted and we liked it. It was pleasant and fun. Fast forwarding today, where maybe a lot of us still have that childish side sometimes, do we consider ourselves a creative human being? How much time do we invest in creativity? Is that a moment we are actually mindful about it? How often do we stop, think, and try to generate as many ideas as possible to find a solution to our challenge? Do we ask for other’s collaboration on this type of exercise?
Creativity is not only for well known artists, singers or painters… myth! Everyone is creative. With time, we stopped being the little boys and girls we used to be and we slowly lose that unconscious voluntary thought that we are capable of creating and create well. There are several reasons for this to happen but mostly because we live in a society where public scrutiny is promoted, we are not allowed to fail, we have to be best at everything and we have to do things just because it is pretty or someone upstairs wants to show some work done. We need to stop feeding this behaviour and look for ways to feel like a creative boy or girl again. When we liked it and it was pleasant. People need to feel free and empowered to think, to generate ideas, to test, to experiment, to fail, to iterate, to refine, and to repeat this cycle as many times needed. People need to defer judgement while working as a team or interacting with stakeholders. Multidisciplinary teams are paramount to develop creativity as different perspectives about the same subject on the table are a value added to spark that extra constructive imagination.
On the other hand there is something we call innovation. Innovation does not necessarily mean technology or digital. It can be something physical or even intangible. To innovate is to find a sustainable and efficient solution to a real unmet need or future benefit. That is how you really innovate. Quite often leaders perceive innovation as the capacity to generate crazy ideas that no one had before. This might actually happen during a Design Thinking problem solving approach, but is not the real definition of how to be innovative. Some leaders get really disappointed at the end of a brainstorming session because no “crazy” idea he/she ever heard before was generated. This is not the purpose of a brainstorming exercise nor the right focus to foster innovation.
With both concepts described, creativity and innovation, now take a moment and imagine a team working under the same purpose by all individuals, where all feel free and not judged to generate lots of ideas and lots of possible solutions for the challenge they are working on. Imagine they frame the real problem they are trying to solve well and, as a team, they collect evidence from the real world that is a problem to which there is no wise solution yet. Current successful organizations cultivate these two ingredients very well. Additionally, they invest in their human capital so everyone is empowered to feel free to think, get inspired and contribute to generate real impact into the world.