Report 103
A weekly newsletter on creativity, ideas, innovation and invention.

Tuesday, 18 May 2004
Issue 17

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your weekly newsletter on Creativity, ideas, innovation and invention. My apologies for the late issue this week!

As always, if you have news about creativity, please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103.

 

INDIVIDUAL VERSUS ORGANISATIONAL CREATIVITY

When attempting to improve creativity in business, there are two approaches which may be taken, either individually or together: INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY and ORGANISATIONAL CREATIVITY.

Individual creativity is, of course, the creativity of the individual. Everyone has what I call a creative comfort level which is based on their natural creativity quotient, their willingness to risk new ideas and their personality. People can be trained to think more creatively and to apply creative thinking strategies to various activities. However, you cannot push someone far beyond her creative comfort level without causing stress. And stress is likely to lead to reduced creativity, unhappiness with the company and other problems.

Likewise, naturally creative people forced to work in an organisation that inhibits creativity will also become stressed. Naturally creative people have ideas all the time and like to share those ideas. Moreover, they appreciate the recognition that is showered upon a good idea. Having their ideas ignored, criticised and being told to focus on the tried and tested rather than finding new approaches will only disillusion the creative thinker and cause stress.

Organisational creativity, on the other hand, is the creative capability of an entire organisation.

One method of boosting an organisation's creativity, of course, is boosting the creativity of the individuals within the organisation. Unfortunately, this is inefficient and will not succeed at all unless aspects of the organisation's creative processes are also managed.

In order to boost organisational creativity, it is critical that the organisation create an environment that includes:

• Trust. Employees must trust management before they will share ideas with management. Employees must not feel their jobs or their future prospects will be threatened should they propose a bad idea. Employees must feel they will be rewarded for sharing ideas with the company rather than have their ideas stolen by the company.

• An environment that actively encourages the sharing of new ideas.

• Good communications that ensure everyone's voice is heard, everyone can find out what is happening throughout the company and everyone can share ideas across the company.

• An idea management structure that ensures good ideas are shared with the organisation, recognised and implemented for the organisation.

Likewise, it is important for companies to recognise who their creative thinkers are and to take advantage of them. Creative thinkers can lead – or at least participate in – creative teams that review problematic issues within the organisation and propose solutions. (I will look at creative teams in organisations in a future issue of Report 103)

Moreover, creative thinkers should participate in creative teams dealing with issues outside their divisions. Unprejudiced by the methodology of those divisions, creative thinkers will often bring very new ideas to and new approaches to the divisions.

It is also important for companies to hire management from other industries than their own. A car company hiring an executive with 20-30 years of experience in the car industry can be assured of hiring someone who knows the car industry. Unfortunately, such a manager will be bringing tried and tested car industry solutions to the company. There is nothing wrong with this. But it is not innovative.

Better to hire some managers from completely different industries. A car company hiring managers from a film production company, fashion company and service company can be assured of hiring managers with different ways of looking at issues; people who might be able to apply operational ideas from other industries to the car industry. People who will bring innovative approaches – at least from the perspective of the car industry.

And it is only by bringing such new approaches that companies can out-innovate the competition.

 

INNOVATION AND TERRORISM

I shall touch upon a political topic today, one about which I have strong feelings. But I shall try to approach it as apolitically as possible. If I do offend you, remember that these are my opinions only.

The war on terrorism, while a noble cause, has been fought with a disturbing lack of innovation on our part. As a result, we have to hope that the terrorists we are fighting are equally uninnovative. Otherwise, I fear we are in trouble.

The problem is that the war on terrorism is being fought almost entirely with technology. And while technology can help us be more innovative, the technology itself is unable to think creatively.

Consider the tools being installed at airports to prevent terrorists from getting on aeroplanes. Focusing on airports, incidentally, assumes terrorists will retry old methods rather than create new methods of unleashing terror (as they did in Madrid).

Tests that check names, scan faces, scan irises or scan fingerprints and compare them to databases of known terrorists are doubly bad news for people like you and I (for surely no terrorists read this newsletter!). Such tests lull us into a false sense of security. By believing that the technology has ensured only good people have boarded a flight, we are surprised and unprepared when bad people have done so.

More frighteningly, such tests actually help terrorists hone their methods - should they wish to attack us with aeroplanes again. All the perspective terrorist needs to do is to board a few aeroplanes. If his name, face, eyes and fingerprints do not bring up any alerts, he knows he can readily board just about any commercial airline flight he likes. As a result, it has become much easier for the innovative terrorist to blow up an aeroplane than it ever has been in the past – thanks to anti-terrorism technology.

Other technological solutions, designed to identify potential terrorists and to monitor their behaviour, face the same problem. As soon as a group of terrorist knows that one of their members has been identified as a terrorist, they can replace him with another, unidentified member. Fortunately for the terrorists, airport testing helps groups monitor whether or not members are in fact wanted.

The Good Old Days...

In fact, the CIA, KGB, MI6 and their like had a far better approach in the days of the cold war. Instead of relying on technology to identify and monitor terrorists, they relied on agents in the field who knew the enemy's language and social behaviour. These agents could then develop networks of people (within the enemy's operations) who could provide information to the agents. Likewise, the agents could observe key personnel from within the enemy's ranks and make judgements based on their knowledge of the enemy.

Agents in the field in enemy territory have to live by their wits, have to apply subterfuge and need to be very much aware of what is happening around them. In short, they need to be innovative. They need to find creative solutions quickly and they need to use intuition and knowledge to analyse the enemy's behaviour.

Frankly, I would feel a lot more secure if governments like the USA's, the UK's and others were putting agents into the field in places where terrorist networks, such as Al Qaeda's, operate. It is only be interacting with the enemy, understanding the enemy and finding innovative approaches to fighting the enemy that we can defeat the enemy.

But, as far as I know, this is not happening.

Jeffrey Baumgartner

 

 

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