The Personal Creativity Cycle and the Organizational Innovation Cycle

Creativity Inc outlines creativity practices that entail learning new competencies, establishing a facilitating environment, and offering creativity programs. The keys to creativity, its authors say, are intrinsic motivation, curiosity, making and breaking connections, and honest idea evaluation.

Bengt explains his cycle, diagrammed above, as follows:

• Draw Inspiration: You are challenged and/or inspired by something.
• Exercise Personal Courage: The healthy tension between curiosity (opportunity) and fear (risk), when appropriately encouraged and reinforced by healthy sense of self-esteem, drives you to explore the opportunities.
• Break Connections: You break the existing connections in your synapses to free your mind (using TRIZ, lateral thinking, meditation and other techniques) from established, limiting patterns.
• Open Yourself: You stay in limbo, i.e. with a completely open mind, and draw on input from outside sources, especially those that intersect and synthesize multiple disciplines, and add your own internal sensory, integrative and inductive inputs.
• Create New Connections: You draw on a balance of intuition, emotional intelligence and rational intellect to choose and make new and better connections to convert ideas into opportunities. These opportunities then drive the innovation process.
• Feel the Reward: The creative process is its own intrinsic reward, a much stronger motivator for more creative effort than externally-offered rewards. The joy you receive from the creative process strengthens your self-value and self-esteem and provokes even more creativity.

Not coincidentally, there is a lot of the ‘suspending’ and ‘letting go’ elements of the Presence model in Bengt’s model. This is a personal creative process. Now let’s put it together with the organizational  creative and innovation process we developed for AHA!:

So, to reiterate Bengt’s personal creativity cycle, we, as individuals, (1) draw inspiration, (2) exercise personal courage, (3) break connections, (4) open ourselves to input from without and within, (5) draw on intuition, emotional intelligence and rational intellect to create new connections, and (6) feel the reward — the joy that this creative process gives us (outer circles of this chart). 

Creative organizations invite us to apply this creative process to organizational creative and innovative tasks. In organizational creative work, we collectively (a) learn, (b) listen/observe, (c) explore, (d) understand, (e) organize, (f) imagine, (g) reach out, and (h) brainstorm (leftmost 8 boxes of the inner circle of this chart). In organizational innovation work, we collectively (i) canvass the ‘crowd’ for confirmation that our ideas meet a genuine need, (j) design, (k) experiment, (l) question/challenge, and (m) realize the idea into a successful offering (rightmost 5 boxes of inner circle of this chart). All six elements of individual creativity in Bengt’s model are applied in all 13 aspects of the organizational creative and innovation process.

These are both cycles, and ideas and actions pass through their intersections and give them momentum dynamically, much as electrons are exchanged in chemical reactions. For example, you might be reading about a new type of plastic that dissolves inertly in water, and later about the problems with sorting and recycling of packaging materials (individual creativity cycle step 4). You connect the two learnings together (step 5), and get excited about the possibilities (step 6). You are inspired (step 1) to invent a packaging material that can safely be washed down the sink. You overcome the fear of being thought foolish for such a radical idea, the fear that someone has probably already patented it, the fear that nothing plastic can really ever be harmless to the environment (step 2), and are propelled by your courage to start thinking boldly about the possible applications of such a technology in all kinds of packaging (step 3).

At any point in this personal cycle, you may be drawn into, or create, an organizational group that can explore this idea and do what needs to be done to bring it to fruition. It might start with learning from a business colleague more about plastics, and sharing what you know so far (step a), or a casual brainstorming with trusted colleagues over lunch (step h). Someone in the organization may hear about your exploration and authorize a group to explore it (step b), or to design a prototype (step j & k). The personal creative cycle can thus intersect with and be propelled by the organizational creative and innovation cycle at almost any point, and vice versa.

Some of the articles I have been reading lately (notably this one by innovation guru Michael Schrage suggest that there may be three more steps in the innovation cycle between (i) canvass and (j) design:

• champion — do whatever needs to be done to inform and persuade people in the organization that the idea makes sense, and overcome resistance to it
• obtain sponsorship — find the person or people in the organization needed to get the project approved, and persuade them of its value
• obtain resources — identify and get approval for the time of various people in the organization, the money and other resources needed to implement the idea

That would increase to 16 the number of steps in the group/organizational cycle. I welcome comments from readers on this revision to our model, and how to integrate it with Bengt’s in a graphic way that is not overwhelming to understand.

Why is there so little innovation in most organizations today, when there is so much creative talent and so many ideas and so much information floating around? My hypothesis:

Organizations are not stupid. They have achieved success by effectively meeting customers’ needs. They are not motivated to change what they’re doing until something averse happens — dropping revenues due to a competitor’s disruptive innovation or a dramatic change in the economy, buying criteria or demographics. Too often, by the time this happens it is too late.

Successful organizations should be anticipating such averse events and bringing either sustaining innovations or disruptive innovations of their own to preempt such events. They should be putting in place an environment that encourages their employees and others (including customers) to apply their personal creative skills to help in that effort. And they should trust their employees and customers to be a vital force in the organization’s innovation efforts, and put in place programs to demonstrate that trust and tap that creative talent.

Failure to do so represents not only a squandered opportunity and a waste of talent, but also guarantees that most of your employees will be bored, disengaged and disinterested in the organization’s success beyond their own personal interest, and likewise guarantees a largely indifferent and unloyal customer base.