What is creativity and how do you foster it in a company?

Epreuve d'examen , 2007 , 34 Pages , Note: 1.3

Gestion d'entreprise - Direction d'entreprise, Management, Organisation

Creativity is a term that seems to be both intangible and very complex. It is one of the buzzwords of today’s society and there is almost no faculty or perspective left out, which examined creativity and came to the result that it is either already inherent in their area or necessary.

While creativity was mostly aligned with arts in the past it is today often associated with innovation in many different domains.

To get some more insights, I have talked to many people. Among these ‘interviews’ was one conversation group consisting of ten very different people such as students, entrepreneurs, managers, consultants and creatives. This conversation was held in the hotel Intercontinental in Wellington, lasted for approximately four hours and will be used as the groundwork for this paper.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Conversation
2.1 Creativity Means Being in Love with Chocolate
2.2 Stimuli for Creativity
2.3 The Creativity Process
2.4 Creative Outcomes
2.5 Human Attributes
2.6 Fostering Creativity in Organizations
2.6.1 Freedom & other Barriers

3. Conclusion

4. References

1. INTRODUCTION

If someone would come up with the idea to build a house for misused words, then the word family around the word ‘creativity’ would be entitled to an entire level.

This word seems to be used for everything that you can’t call ‘interesting’ for courtesy reasons. Today everyone seems to be creative, somehow! Marketers, housewives, definitely every manager and even controller – these are the guys who take care of the money in a company!

Creativity has become one of the most frequently used words in contemporary literature. Being in a book store you can’t miss books about creative leadership, creative management or books that tell you how every single one of your employees can become a creative genius just by following some simple (of course) rules.

That sounds good and surely people want their employees to be creative especially as it leads automatically - like by an invisible hand - to innovation. And innovation is good. Well, at least the potential payoffs in the financial report, right?

But what is all this profitable hype about? What is creativity and furthermore, in managerial terms, how do you foster it in a company? Here, most literature will tell you something about maintaining freedom and disestablishing fear or mechanisms, which encourage fear.

There seems to be something true to it but can this be all?

Not to forget the new politician hobby ‘creative industries’. Creative in these terms are the usual suspects – artists, actors, musicians and so on. To support them is the goal and to put the responsibility on their shoulders for the wealth of their countries – a nightmare.

Not just because creativity often is a subvention sector. Much more important is the mistrust expressed towards the creative in economy and society. And this is not without reasons: If creativity becomes a factor of production and the ability of coming up again and again with new ideas becomes the secret of success, then the old order does not make much sense anymore. If it comes to the work schedule or to breaking up with traditions – everything must be put into question, challenged. Who wants that anyhow?

But those who still want to be in business tomorrow are better off to break out of the usual ways of thinking. That is the corporate philosophy at Google, the announced government goal in the United Kingdom and the beginning of a new era in some of the most successful companies.

But everyone has to find their own way and those who understand that have already mastered the first step.

2. CONVERSATION

2.1 Creativity Means Being in Love with Chocolate

I asked a few people if they would like to join a conversation group on creativity and how to foster it in companies.

Surprisingly, most were very keen on joining it and some of them told me on the phone about one or more books on creativity that they had already read.

I arrive at the hotel and everything is already beautifully set up for our group. I have told the

Hotel staff about how important this conversation would be for me and they decided to provide the coffee for us for the whole evening. Even bowls of finger food are on the tables.

My friend Mike, who will also join our group, is already there setting up the camera.

Mike Potton grew up in a Nelson, a city which seems to be famous for its creativity, studies film and philosophy in his first year at the Victoria University of Wellington and is the son of a well known New Zealand photographer.

Almost at the same time Warwick arrives, an IT professional with a degree in mathematics and highly interested in the intersections between IT, mathematics and creativity.

We wait a little bit and soon the others arrive at the hotel and we all introduce each other.

My concerns about how to start this conversation are soon blown away when I really feel how eager they all are on starting it.

‘Well, after your call I thought about it over and over again and I believe that creativity is a concept of originality on an individual level, somewhat personal,’ begins Warwick.

Jack, our IT entrepreneur agrees that, ‘Creativity is about inventing something different or new. It is a conceptual thing and has to be somehow expressed.’

George, a chocolatier from the Czech Republic and the owner of the ‘melting perfection’, a high quality chocolate shop in Wellington, smiles and I can guess what he is about to say, ‘Creativity is being in love with chocolate,’ and all of a sudden the entire group is laughing and becoming increasingly relaxed.

This is how everything begins and everyone has something to say.

It is not really a conversation yet but rather everyone’s individual statements from many different perspectives. It feels like all the random statements are bouncing around between the group members and instead of talking about them it all gets into a big mess as even more random things are said.

In the end everyone has thrown his or her ideas in the ‘What is creativity’ group idea-pot and slowly they begin to think about everything that was said and the discussion begins. It is like we are now picking one statement after the other out of the ‘idea-pot’ and trying to make sense to it, trying to find out what to do with it.

2.2 Stimuli for Creativity

At first, the conversation focuses on where creativity comes from. What makes people being creative or wanting to be creative?

Malcolm, an artist playing in the ‘New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’ as well as the inventor of the carbon fibreglass double bass cases, seems to be thinking hard and then says, ‘Creativity is universal. Everyone wants to be creative.’

‘I don’t think so,’ replies Judith, a government consultant,’ furthermore, people can’t be creative when they are forced.’

‘No, but maybe when they are frustrated. My biggest success was born out of frustration,’ comments Malcolm.

‘I think,’ says Jack, ‘The right questions are crucial. Creativity is maybe a way of responding to questions’.

‘Right, answering by making things differently, having or developing a new concept.’

Then George argues, ‘So, in terms of flavours I often experience that being unhappy with some makes you want to create something new.’

Malcolm replies, ‘Sounds like you have a great imagination and you’ve found a way to express it.’

‘So creativity is something ego-driven’? Asks Jack and continues, ‘What is the trigger? Sounds like frustration to me’, thinks Jack.

Christoph, who works for the Goethe-Institute and has just arrived asks, ‘But frustration is such a negative thing. Isn’t rather liberty essential? I experienced that when there is no force or no direction then people can be creative. For example, we have one day in the company where we don’t turn on the computers before after midday and nobody can really work. So people are wandering around and doing all sorts of things. They talk to each other and many of our best ideas are created in these moments.’

He goes on, ‘I think that the experience of not knowing what comes next is so deliberating and that makes you feel really creative.’ states Christoph and Rebecca answers, ‘But you must be open to it. What if you were grumpy’?

‘When I still lived in Europe,’ says George, ’I travelled to Belgium and lived there for quite a while in order to learn how to make chocolate. I learned a process of how to make it but I was very frustrated by it as I knew I could do better. This frustration really made me want to change things.’

I ask him whether he thinks that some cultures encourage and foster creativity more or better than others.

‘You can’t do that everywhere. Not every culture values creativity or new ways. What I am doing here with my chocolate store for example, that would never work over in the Czech Republic. They would have said I am crazy. There, chocolate has to be a certain way, a way that is so and so old and therefore must be good whereas everything new just must be bad.

But being accepted is so very, very important for your motivation and so for creativity.’

Thereon I ask him if that is why he came to New Zealand.

‘Exactly. Here people don’t give you the feeling that you can’t do it. It is really easy in New Zealand to be creative and doing whatever you want. Just great!’ He says.

‘I also think that New Zealand encourages creativity more. We are not used to have constraints,’ stresses Jack.

‘In China everything is more rigid and they think faking things is creative,’ Helmut describes joyfully, a big guy with a strong voice and en entrepreneur. He has just arrived with his wife Judith who is a government consultant and incredibly interested in our topic.

‘When there hasn’t been much money and the urgency to do something could be a driver,’ he adds.

‘So that’s creative problem solving.’ says Malcolm, ‘The successes we have here in New Zealand seem to be solutions out of a necessity.’

George describes (and it sounds like heaven to me), ‘In Belgium you have a hundred chocolate stores in every city (!) but when I came to New Zealand there was not even one here in Wellington. So there was a necessity factor, I must agree, but that also meant uncertainty to me as I had to ask myself if New Zealand was maybe not ready yet for chocolate stores, it just seemed so impossible that a city didn’t have a decent chocolate store.’

‘Europe seems to be so much more creative. Everyone talks about Europe in these terms,’ says Mike.

I am really surprised although I am not hearing this for the first time. What does he mean by Europe? Russia? Maybe Germany or Italy? France?

Well, I wouldn’t say that Germany encourages much creativity and with respect to Russia, well, the Soviet Union was not that long ago and I have my doubts about how much socialism or better communism (as socialism never existed in practice) encouraged creativity. Well, there was creativity but for utterly different reasons. Reasons, such as to survive the system or to escape it but there was also creativity emerging from necessity.

Like in Buenos Aires nowadays. After the upper class had ruined Argentina the people there had to help themselves and so they started to design ‘rubbish’ and sell it. In 2005 Buenos Aires got as the first city ever the worldwide title ‘City of design’ and Buenos Aires’ creative sector generates six per cent of its GDP.

There are more examples like that, but the point is that culture surely influences the individual in many ways and therefore also his or her creativity - in both positive and negative ways. As Mark Runco has said (Lau, Hui, NG, 2004, p. 11) ‘They (differences in cultures) influence ideas and ideational paths explored and tolerated; they determine what experiences the individual will have and which investments (e.g., training, education) the individual will make, they determine what behaviours will be shared.’

But creativity also influences culture and Immanuel Kant made a good point in his work ‘Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View’. Here he looked on creativity from the perspective of the possibilities for the maintenance of reproduction of culture and emphasised the importance of communication as a necessary condition for creativity and if that is true then communication is one of the keys to fostering creativity in organizations.

Thinking about Russia one other thing comes to my mind, my most favourite author Fyodor Dostoevsky. In my eyes an absolute genius without any doubts and one of the greatest souls ever. But was he creative? Is genius correlated with creativity? Or were it just his extraordinary analytical skills and his ability to see things as they really were, to see the soul of the world he lived in, which made him so, well yes, so creative? I can’t think of any other word!

But using creativity in these terms often means describing a ‘creative’ outcome and this judgement is due to what the audience values. It doesn’t say anything about the process that led to this outcome, which is just a result, the result of creativity.

Through writing or ‘creating’ novels Dostoevsky found a way to express himself and to bring to the surface what he could best, seeing the soul of the world he lived in.

Writing a book is creation so therefore, does it mean that creativity is something that brings talent or even genius to the surface?

‘Every person has the potential to be creative but sometimes has first to come in contact with it. Creativity is a state of being and it is not about someone is or is not creative.’ Rebecca says and Judith smilingly replies, ‘Almost all mothers are creative. I have children and I have to be creative in the ways I manage them. I always try to do it right and have to come up with many things every day.

2.3 The Creativity Process

After a while the conversation drifts away from the stimuli aspect of creativity to the actual process of creativity.

Malcolm Struthers argues, ‘Creativity in terms of performance means that you do something new every time but must have an idea and the opportunity to express it.’

Rebecca disagrees, ‘It is not about something new happening all the time, it is about something that has to happen in yourself,’ emphasising that ‘in’.

Malcolm replies that, ‘Well, it is like you try something, you challenge the game and randomly things happen. So basically a trial and error thing. It is about pushing the boundaries and going beyond them.’

‘So you have to stop to do routine things in order to be creative?’ I ask. ‘Or on one extreme maybe even destroy ‘old’ things first so that creativity can emerge?’

‘Well, yes. George, aren’t you sort of destroying first in your chocolate process? You get this pure block of chocolate, which you destroy and then start to create things. Or even the old processes to make chocolate you have told us about?’ asks Helmut.

‘This is radical image is really helpful,’ states Christoph.

Eventually George outlines reflectively, ‘Yeah, letting it go and just do it.’

We destroy everything, break everything apart and the preservers of the old ways hate us for that because we question everything, detest the tradition because it causes that things are done the same way they were always done. We don’t want to see normality anymore. We want more, we want it better, and we want everything. Let’s be honest – creativity is destruction.

Really? Well, yes and there are many out there to back this theory up. Schumpeter, for example, who obtained a maverick’s role within the neoclassic due to his rather extreme theories. With respect to creativity his core statement was (Schumpeter, 1942) that every economical development is based on a process of creative destruction. This process’s inherent task is to destroy old structures due to which factors of production experience a new order.

But is it possible that also destruction, just like creativity, can have more than one meaning?

Again, yes!

Destruction can be destructive. This one destroys so badly so that wherever it rages nothing will ever grow again.

But there is a second kind of destruction, the less prevalent, necessary one that creates room for the new.

Destruction, however, feels bad. It hurts and it frightens. The key is to focus on the future, looking forward and appreciating the created room for the new instead of crying out loud for the past.

Then creativity will rebuild again – in most cases bigger and better.

Children do that. They build little towers and destroy them just to make a new, bigger one.

This kind of destruction means letting things go for something new. It is the basis for innovation and change starting by mentally destroying the way you usually think about something, taking new perspectives, seeing things in a new light.

[...]

• Université: Victoria University of Wellington
• Note: 1.3
• Auteur: Patrizia Duda (Auteur)
• Année de publication: 2007
• Pages: 34
• N° de catalogue: V80860
• ISBN (ebook): 9783638833905
• ISBN (Livre): 9783640257041
• Langue: anglais
• mots-clé: What