1. What are you personal experiences with individual
creativity? Have you had times when you felt especially creative or,
even, especially uncreative?
Working in federal technology consulting my life was not
creative at all. I spent 2 years
following or trying to get around rules and guidelines set up by the federal
governments to make tasks take an unnecessarily long time. Those years were spent figuring out if
someone had done the task before and then adapting their solution to fit my
needs. If anything I would say this
process stifled any creativity I had in me.
I was told to use the “methodologies established” before creating
anything of my own. No one explicitly said it and I don't think people meant
their words to do what they did but they discouraged creativity.
After I hit my breaking point, I decided I wanted to try something new
and joined an incubator that was essentially a start up within the firm. The
first day on the team they sat me down and said you are not allowed to use any
Microsoft product other than email and if you do you can only communicate with
people outside of this group. They forced me to think outside the box and move
away from templates and only doing things had been done before. We were
tasked with developing new solutions with open source software for emerging
markets clients. We went to client of the past and asked what their pain points
were from there we brainstormed solutions to help them. To do this we
used a rapid prototype/ waterfall method. While working on this team I
was pushed to learn about a tool set I knew nothing about and an industry I
knew nothing about. I had to be creative. I felt liberated and
frustrated at the same time.
2. What are your personal experiences with organizational
creativity? Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways
that made them more creative or, even, especially uncreative?
Companies I have worked at include a technology Consulting firm
and a prominent high tech product development company. Overall I would say that
both are not creative. There are pockets
of creativity in both but creativity is not fostered at either one.
At
the high tech company, I tired to use a new technology to help the solve their
problem but received resistance at every turn, they only wanted to use
excel. To me managing a project or suite of tasks would be best done in a
project management tool and not excel. I was forced to program a version of Microsoft
project with excel to do many of the same functions. They could not handle changing from one
software that tey knew to another even if was better tool for the job.
At the
consulting company, we were expected to and sold projects based on the fact
that we have done projects like the one we are working on before therefore creativity
was not expected or asked for by the client.
We had a library of past projects and deliverables from them were all
located that helped this process happen.
3. Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of
being creative by yourself? And, better yet, do you think a group within
an organization is capable of being creative?
I
think an individual can be creative in their own life or in their own
surroundings. As an individual I can control what happens around me and how I
respond to what is happening around me. It is harder for one person to be
creative in an organization because they will not have the mass that it is
needed to make an impact. They will be
fighting the current of the river for lack of a better analogy. An individual
that is leading a team will have a better chance of inspiring creativity within
their little bubble. If they are able to
develop solutions that are inspiring and different from what others are developing
that solve the problems then they may receive credit for their
innovation/creativity. If this happened
there is a chance for them to change how the overall company works and change
the path moving forward. It sounds easier than it really is. Below is a story of when I was at Deloitte in
a start up like environment
A
group of people being creative together, working towards a single goal can be
creative. The incubator I was in is proof of this being possible.
We were able to be successful and develop a suite of tools that the client wanted. We did this through innovative tools that
others were not using. At many times
people within the organization we a part of were interested in what we were
doing and had us in to speak. The
presentations would always go well and people would ask for follow up which we
did but they would always drop the ball on their end and not receive sign off
for using the tools from the higher ups.
Overall, the organization was interested in what we were doing but in
the end did not want to implement the tools developed due to bureaucratic
reasons. The team who started the initiative have since left the firm and
founded their our startup using ideas we developed in the incubator.
Interestingly the firm is now partnering with them for projects and selling
them as a new offering. The firm wanted
to use them but while on the inside it was to hard to change the way the
organization as a whole worked but was a lot easier to bring them in as a
separate organization that was “special”
4.
What do you think about the idea of different creative types of problems
and, thus, different creative processes? Should we trust ourselves just
to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?
I
have been told my whole adult life that there is a framework for everything so
why not creativity? Companies like IDEO have made innovation something
you can replicate almost like a framework. They have developed their business
model based on being able to develop solutions that companies cannot do
themselves. This is interesting to think about because they themselves are not
creative they are really just viewing the problems from a different lens
through a set of methodologies or frameworks. Applying a framework to be creative
just does not seem like actually being creative to me.
I
think there is value in trusting your gut to find the best solution but also
understanding that when one approach does not work you need to realize it
quickly and change your path.
I think there is value in trusting your gut to find the best
solution but also understanding that when one approach does not work you need
to realize it quickly and change your path.
I am not sure which one represents me all times; it depends more on the problem
at hand. Understanding that both are
important and it is useful to use
different skills to solve different problems depending on the situation.
