Kathy Harris

Organizational creativity is the sum of the creativity of all the players – employees, customers, service providers, experts, etc. — plus the collective brainpower of the organization. To tap into this brainpower, develop principles and actions that foster creativity. Here are a few ideas to get your started: 

• Rapid knowledge and idea sharing – big ideas, crazy ideas, best practices and worst practices — all need to flow freely in the organization. Aim for processes that showcase these ideas across the organization. Allow for rapid adoption of the best ideas. Reward creative reuse of ideas.
• Effective information management – information over-load and poor information quality should not be tolerated. Relevance and ranking analytics should be applied to get at the “meat” of information flowing within the organization.
• “Voice of the customer” – if customer-facing products and services are the keys to success, find a way to engage these primary stakeholders. Start with your employee customers and users.
• Visualize concepts and information relationships – develop your employee skills in representing concepts and ideas in graphical form. Others are more likely to grasp and respond to ideas if presented visually – so, make a concerted effort to strengthen your skills in the visual representation of information.
• Develop deep analysis and analytical skills – drive these skills deeper into the organization and avoid isolating them in competency centers. Improve the analytical practices of the organization as a whole. 

Are there other skills that belong on our list?