Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation
The Leading for Innovation set consists of the following modules:
You are in the Ideation and creativity module
Ideation and creativity
The big idea: yes you are creative
“Organisations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.”
Ted Levitt, former editor Harvard Business Review
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets
W E Deming, engineer and management writer
Ideation and creativity - the challenge
We know that we don’t have all of the solutions already; otherwise the world wouldn’t still be so full of complex issues and problems. The 'Imagine' stage in our innovation process gives us a space to come up with genuinely new ideas – and
as many as possible. But that is more difficult than it sounds of course – not because people 'just aren't creative' but because our organizational cultures often dismiss or stifle qualities like imagination, experimentation and play.
From early in our careers, we are 'taught':
- not to make mistakes – which limits our appetite for taking risks
- to push failures away – rather than learn from them
- to stay with the consensus – not stand out too much.
So, when we get to positions of management or leadership, it's not surprising that we find it difficult to 'turn our creativity back on'. And we can also struggle to help the people we work with to regain their imaginative spark, even when
we know that we desperately need some new approaches – it just feels too risky…
What leaders can learn from Design Thinking
The truth is we are all creative – we just may not bring that aspect of ourselves to work. If you ask your colleagues about their lives outside work, they will often talk about their creative interests, the volunteering they take part in and
the things they make in their spare time. From cooking and gardening to leading youth groups, coaching teams and even setting up entire charities – without their managers and leaders ever knowing anything about it! So what can we do to
help people bring all of that energy, imagination and enthusiasm to solving our organizational issues as well?
In recent years, 'Design Thinking' (DT) approaches have been increasingly introduced into public sector organisations, often under the name 'service design'. Design Thinking approaches were (as you might suspect!) created by designers – people
who make a living out of creativity.
By encouraging ‘wild ideas’ Design Thinking approaches help us to make big leaps in our thinking and practice; leaps that small fixes and improvements could never achieve. But DT is not about being random or just implementing 'the first thing
that came into our heads'. Through refining and testing, other DT approaches then help us to use these wild ideas to build possibilities that are both radical and practical, ready for a more thorough investigation in the Experiment phase.
Design Thinking processes and techniques are brilliantly designed to create safe and predictable structures that allow wild ideas to happen. When people can trust the process (and each other), they are much more likely to give voice to their
odd ideas, dreams and 'wonderings'. And, as a leader for Innovation – your most important job is to encourage those voices. You can:
- make time and space for collaborative thinking
- open your innovation conversations up to diverse voices – including service users, experts from other fields and staff from all levels
- encourage people to voice their wild ideas – maybe even come up with some of your own!
By the end of the Imagine stage:
- you should feel that you are moving away from problems and towards solutions.
- you should feel that users are an important part of your development team.
- you should feel that you have one or more high-potential ideas that you are ready to explore further.
The rest of this module will take you through the 'Imagine' stage in more depth and offer a variety of methods that you can use to get creative about your innovation challenge.
Continue to: The imagine stage
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