Ideas for creativity
Ideas for Creativity“The real revolution in the information age is the ability to use our minds differently” (John Scully, former MD Apple Computers)
We LIVE in a fast changing world where businesses need to continuously sustain their competitive advantage. This requires them to be innovative both in terms of problem-solving and idea generation to improve ways of doing business (processes, systems, procedures etc.)
The article will examine the barriers that people in organisations face in solving problems and idea generation and offer some suggested techniques which could help you become even more innovative in the workplace.
Barriers:
- Definition: You need to challenge the definition of the problem, look at it from a different perspective and angle and this will allow you to generate a wider variety of solutions.
- Experience: Your experience can help solve problems but it can also prevent from finding new ways of doing things. Especially if the system is successful already, why improve?
- Fear: Our fear of failure can prevent us from being innovative. This fear can be expressed through the use of “killer phrases” like “it will never work”, “we tried it before…” etc.
- Ownership: We are sometimes keen to project our own ideas and this blinkers us to other “gems” generated by other team members.
- Social: We can be reluctant in expressing an idea because it might be seen as unacceptable, destructive or against “society rules”.
- Organisational: It may not be politically correct to mention your ideas because of the organisational hierarchy and the strategies.
Techniques to innovative problem solving:
- Brainstorming: A popular tool that can use to develop creative solution to a problem. During the session, the quantity of ideas matters over their quality, therefore, encourage crazy and bizarre ideas without criticising. Judgements and analysis at this stage will stunt idea generation. After the brain- storming session, the ideas are the evaluated and, using selection criteria, the best ones are selected. This can be done either individually, with a group of a combination of both.
- The fishbone/ Ishikawa diagram, this method is used to find out the causes that produce the problem (the effect). The diagram resembles a fishbone where on the head of the fish the problem is stated and along the bones, the causes are generated. The next stage involves examining each factor further and evaluating it to find out the biggest cause of the problem.
- Analogies: People seem to find it easier to solve other people’s problems than their own. This technique helps you move from your given problem on to an analogous problem, involving a different situation altogether and finding solutions to that situation. If, for example the problem is “How to encourage our employees to generate ideas for improvement”, the analogy could be “How to encourage people to donate blood”. You can then take ideas and see which ones can be applied to the original problem.
- The above techniques can help enhance innovation in your organisation for business success.