Don't let the dominant voices dominate brainstorming sessions.
Innovation is key to success in business, but it can be difficult to establish a consistently innovative culture within an organization, not least because the creative process itself can be both challenging and draining. Today, on World Creativity and Innovation Day, six experts share their secrets for encouraging people to come up with great ideas.
1. Create a psychologically safe learning culture
“When we talk about how leaders can drive innovation and creativity, it’s easy to focus on the individual characteristics of a leader,” says Gillian Pillans, research director of the Corporate Research Forum. “Are they visionary? Do they generate novel ideas?”
Yet research by the Corporate Research Forum finds that the organizational context created by a leader is far more important than their personal characteristics. In particular, leaders should create a psychologically safe learning culture that supports employees to try out new ideas.
Psychological safety – a term popularized by Professor Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School – refers to an organizational context where people feel safe to take risks and make mistakes. “A leadership approach that encourages people to speak up, ask questions, and share ideas is foundational to this,” says Pillans. “Simply put, leaders should create an environment where employees are comfortable that their ideas will be welcomed, rather than ridiculed.”
Pillans advises that leaders can establish psychological safety through creating a culture of trust and mutual respect. They can achieve this by practicing behaviors such as being fully present in conversations, being approachable, acknowledging that they don’t know all the answers, and using mistakes as an opportunity for learning. She concludes: “This will all help to create a culture where people feel like they can experiment and safely make and learn from mistakes – essential prerequisites to creativity and innovation.”
2. Be more human
“If we’re to inject innovation and adaptability back into our organizations, the practice of leadership is due for a revolution,” says Adam Kingl, author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset.“Organizations are only going to change to the extent that their leaders are personally willing to change, and this can be challenging because, as senior executives, we have spent a lifetime learning to succeed in a certain way – in many cases, emulating the leaders above us.”
Kingl argues that customers and colleagues alike increasingly expect leaders to be more human at work. “Becoming a creative leader must be about taking your people with you on this journey,” he says, “communicating emotion and creating clarity and the right environment for a human-forward company.”
When leaders suddenly change without providing context, they can cause their teams to become confused or frustrated,” Kingl warns. He says that practicing a creative mindset is about laying the foundations for an organization that is as human as any individual within it. What’s more, there are five steps to ensure personal and collective success: develop an inspiring personal vision; don’t fear incorporating emotion into communication; attract the unusual and the different into your teams; manage initiatives lightly, allow for adaptation and iteration; and be kind.
3. Use sustainability to drive creativity
Mark Carney, the United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance, has described the transition to a lower-carbon economy as the “greatest commercial opportunity of our time”.
Climate change is also the ultimate test of today’s leaders, according to Solitaire Townsend, author of The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future. “Demand for solutions will only intensify in the coming business cycle,” she explains. “With the global transformation to net zero being worth $3.5 trillion per year, the opportunities for inventiveness are powerful.”
Sustainability also solves another great challenge for leaders: motivation. “Since the pandemic, employee motivation across industries has plummeted,” Townsend explains. “The Great Resignation is only the most obvious symptom of poor morale, with innovation-poverty, creativity gaps and productivity drops felt everywhere.”
She continues: “The only area where that trend is reversed is in social and environmental initiatives. Especially for Gen Z staff, who are overwhelmingly interested in sustainability, showing how creativity and innovation have social purpose can spark imaginations the way quartile returns never will.”
4. Look to the margins
“Business leaders need to move out of their traditional growth comfort zones and encourage their teams to look to the margins of society for creativity, innovation and growth,” suggests Dr Helen Edwards, author of From Marginal to Mainstream: why tomorrow’s brand growth will come from the fringes – and how to get there first.
Edwards argues that marginal behaviors – such as contrarian sleep patterns, naturism, eating insect protein, burying loved ones at home and extreme frugality – are practiced by a tiny percent of the population and are therefore generally ignored by business. “They are ignored because they seem unpromising, untested, weird or even repulsive,” she says. “They are ignored because they may remain marginal.”
Nevertheless, people on the margins may point the way to new innovation, new routes to market and exciting new category creation. “Veganism was marginal once,” Edwards points out. “Now it’s a growing, multi-category sector worth over $23 billion, fueling innovative solutions and new ideas in food, beverages, clothing, leisure and packaging.”
Like veganism, the behaviors and ways of life found at the fringes can break through and surge in popularity – and this surge is not random. “There are signs, clues and motifs that you can look for, to understand and see the swell before it really takes off,” says Edwards. “You can be one of the businesses involved right at the outset, serving this emerging and burgeoning need. What does it take? The willingness and courage to look, understand and creatively imagine the solutions to help it on its way. Today’s margins are tomorrow’s business growth – if you know where and how to look.”
5. Look outside your bubble
“Teams become stuck when certain behaviors dominate,” says Jeremy Campbell, CEO of performance improvement company Black Isle Group. He cites some key “creativity killers” as group thinking, fear of failure and “not invented here” syndrome.
“These traits mutate in well-established teams,” Campbell maintains and he advises that alarm bells should sound for leaders if they hear their long-serving colleagues declaring: “We tried that before, and it didn’t work.”
Campbell believes that leaders who want to kickstart creativity need to move their thinking from “Our world” to “Our world plus”. By that, he means bringing ideas, solutions and innovation into your world from outside your bubble. How have your problems been solved elsewhere? What have other companies done in the same situation? How are they innovating in other sectors? How can technology or data and artificial intelligence (AI) transform your approach?
“Create an ideas session where no one is allowed to kill an idea,” suggests Campbell. “Instead, anyone who speaks must suggest a better one.”
He adds: “Don’t let the dominant voices dominate. The best ideas can often come from the newest and most different perspectives on the team.”
6. Build a team of daydreamers
“Creativity is a process, not an event,” argues Chris Griffiths, co-author of The Creative Thinking Handbook, and founder of the AI-powered brainstorming app Ayoa. “We sometimes associate creativity with those big occasions: breakthroughs in a brainstorming session, or a fun, energetic workshop. Certainly, those are creative moments. But lest we forget, creativity begins inside the human brain. And the best way to engage it is by making time for the mind to wander.”
Griffiths says that the reason why this approach is sometimes met with skepticism is because it challenges the status quo. “It can be hard, as leaders, to encourage our teams to make time for daydreaming,” he explains. “It might sound like time-wasting – especially in the age of hybrid work when levels of trust can be low, but the truth is, this is the best way to promote creativity.”
How many of us get our best ideas while commuting to work, or taking a shower? “There’s a wealth of research proving the connection between daydreaming and creativity, productivity and overall enhanced cognition,” says Griffiths. “So as leaders, it is time to encourage teams to daydream more – whether that is getting out for walks or allowing them to spend time doodling. The creative results will speak for themselves.”
